Dinosaurs and Other Disasters!

Our final full day in Chicago started at the Field Museum. A tip about visiting the Field Museum–on the sign in the lobby, the cheapest ticket listed is the Discovery Pass for $25 per adult. This includes general admission plus access to either a special exhibit or film. However, there is a cheaper admission available–the Basic Pass for $18 per adult. This only gives you access to the permanent exhibits, but if this is your first time at the Field Museum and you don’t have too much time, this is the way to go. There is so much to see with just the permanent exhibits, and we had other plans for the afternoon, so that was all we needed! Mom made a quick run-through of many exhibits, whereas I focused more in-depth on just two: the Africa exhibit and Evolving Planet. The Evolving Planet exhibit is where you will find most of the fossils, except for Sue, the famous T-Rex, who is on display in the lobby. Well, except for her original skull, which is in a glass case upstairs because it’s too heavy for her. She is the largest and most complete T-Rex ever found!

On the second floor, there is a fossil preparation lab where you can watch scientists cleaning and preparing different types of fossils, which is pretty interesting. It is really a very delicate job!

There are more fossils besides the dinosaurs, but of course the dinosaurs are the most popular.

So teacher geek that I am, I decided to research how much it costs to arrange a field trip to the Field Museum and was both impressed and jealous! It appears basic admission is free for all Illinois students and the adults needed to satisfy the ratio requirements. There is a charge for special programs and exhibits, and those appear to range from $2-$6 per student, which isn’t all that bad! Further research showed me that several other museums in Chicago also offer free field trips, including the history museum and the nature museum. If this is all accurate, I am jealous of what high-quality field trip opportunities are available for free in Chicago! As I posted recently, this just isn’t the case in Louisville!

Anyway, that was what we did in the morning. Our afternoon provided us with a slightly different perspective on Chicago. For a Christmas gift, I had purchased my mom a gift certificate for a walking tour with a company called Chicago Elevated. We decided on the Disaster Tour because it sounded…well, different! It was one of the best walking tours ever! Our guide, Margaret, has worked with Second City, and she is so entertaining! She is also really knowledgable about the city, having lived there most of her life and also from spending some time as a docent for the architecture tours. The disaster tour gave us a unique insight into Chicago’s history that we wouldn’t have learned anywhere else. I don’t want to give too much away because you really just need to take the tour yourself, but the disasters ranged from really old to more recent, and from very minor (Donald Trump’s building) to immense (the Great Chicago Fire–we started off with this one since most people know about it, but it isn’t even the most tragic!). Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed the tour and would definitely sign up for another tour by Margaret the next time we are in Chicago!

(Hundreds of people died in one of the least talked-about, but extremely catastrophic disasters of Chicago at this location, formerly the Iroquois Theater! What happened here changed fire codes forever!)