Chicago, IL: The final day

Brian: Great nights make for rough mornings. For some extremely bizarre reason I woke up at 6:20 am. I left Sarah’s room (don’t get any weird ideas, Nick and I both slept in there) and grabbed a glass of water. Apparently I inadvertently woke the other two up beyond the point of falling back asleep, so we left with Sarah and headed off to a VERY early breakfast.

Nick: I smile when I think back to that morning, remembering the most delicious of all breakfast sandwiches. It had, if I can recall correctly, grilled red peppers, turkey, some sort of cheese, perhaps raspberry sauce? Maybe not. Maybe it was spinach.

Brian: How are you confused between raspberry sauce and spinach?

Nick: It doesn’t matter, the point was the sandwich took me places. Good places. Delicious wonderscape places… After breakfast, it was time to say goodbye. We passed a strange woman-door on the way. We went back to Borders and did a little more blogging… Then off to Wicker Park, which can be described fairly well as the “alternative” neighborhood of Chicago. We found a pretty awesome book store, some crazy resturaunts, cafes, and tattoo parlors, then eventually met up with our next host, Shannon, at her apartment. Shannon was funny. Shannon was from California. Shannon had a snake.

Brian: Just for the people who don’t know this about me, I’m not a big snake fan. Like, I get goosebumps when I see one. Now I will admit that Shannon’s 4-foot ball python was probably the nicest snake in the entire world. It was really friendly and it let Nick hold it for a long time and it let me touch the tip of its tail when it wasn’t looking. I just don’t like the idea of things that move on land without legs. It just freaks me out, ok? Well, I made Shannon promise to put the snake away before bed and everything was pretty cool after that. Out of sight, out of mind.

Nick: I enjoyed Brian standing in the dead center of the kitchen when the snake’s location was uncertain. You know, so he could see it coming if it decided to attack. Although I’m not very fond of rollercoasters, so I’m sure I’ll hear about it when we get to the Mall of America. It has a rollercoaster in the mall, if you didn’t know. Get excited. That night, we went to go see Matt Groening and some woman…

Brian: …Linda Barry…

Nick: …talk about their personal journey in to the world of comics. The woman talked a lot more, and though most people laughed with some frequency, they weren’t THAT funny. I mean, it was great, don’t get me wrong. It’s just always interesting when the people that are behind such comically genius works like the Simpsons, Futurama, etc aren’t that funny in person. It makes sense though. You want to be a genius all the time?

Brian: Yeah, it was worth going. The lady was pretty famous in the independent comic community, which is code for nobody has ever heard of her. They played some crowd-pleasing clips of the Simpsons at the end and everybody loved it. After the event, Shannon took us to the airport to pick up her friends and we went out for dinner at a diner in kind of a hip neighborhood. The food was decent, but it must have loaded with Tryptophan because nobody lasted more than 30 minutes after we got back. The snake stayed in its cage, so I was able to sleep comfortably even on the bean-bag sac I passed out on. Well, we leave Chicago tomorrow. If you are wondering why we stayed this day, it was specifically for the Matt Groening and Linda Nobody event. And we are fuhggedabOUTit.