Day 15: St. Louis to Chicago

Lisa said goodbye to me at 4:20 am before jumping in an Uber and heading to the airport for an early flight home. Then her flight was delayed leaving St. Louis and it was going to be a tight connection in Dallas. In the end it all worked out fine and she was back home playing with the cats while Adler and I were driving in the car later that day.

The morning for us started at a company called Companion Baking who wanted to take a look at my Flavor Studio software. There were a thirty minute drive from our hotel and Adler was enthusiastic to watch my sales presentation. He even asked to wear a collared shirt like I did. The meeting was a success (they will be signing up soon!) but lasted a bit longer than we anticipated. Their VP was very generous and made sure that we left their offices with two sandwiches for the road. Thanks Price!

One medium Michael's Special

We then drove back into town for another meeting with Deli Star--the same group that I'd taken to dinner the night before. I did a a short 20 minute training session and answered some questions while Adler ate the sandwich, chips, and brownie he picked up at Companion. Well, he finished the chips and brownie at least.

We were finally on the road to Chicago by 11:30 am which was far later than I'd expected. And as luck would have it, this put us in the thick of the Chicago commute. We'd luckily avoided heavy traffic on this trip. There was one encounter in Houston but other than that it's been easy driving. Until Chicago. I think that we made it to the Airbnb by about 5:30 that evening. We had two nights in Chicago so I actually took the luggage and unpacked the car. And Adler loved the fact that our Airbnb came with a foosball table!

Adler and Harry Caray

Charles from Deli Star used to live in Chicago and told me that we had to get pizza at Michael's which wasn't too far from where we were staying in Bucktown. We ordered their Caesar salad and Adler said that it didn't taste like Caesar dressing. It was more like mayonnaise. Then we had the thin crust Michael's Special Pizza with sausage, mushroom, green peppers, and onion. Was it as good as Charles made it out to be? No. It reinforced my thoughts from the Memphis fried chicken experience at Gus's. It's all about place and interpretation. I've had better pizza at Round Table. But for Charles this was something special and I won't take that away from him. I just wouldn't go back.

Wrigley Field

If my meetings hadn't run long we'd hoped to get to Chicago early enough to take in the Cubs day game at Wrigley. We weren't even close to making it. But we did walk from Michael's down to Wrigley so that we could take a few photos of Adler at one of the nation's most famous ball parks. Then it was back to the Airbnb for several games of foosball before retiring for the night...