Natural History & Art Institute

Today was our last full day in Chicago and I think we left the best for last. We started the day with The Field Museum of Natural History. It was down on the south end of town with the planetarium and aquarium from yesterday. Once again we stopped at Yolk for breakfast and I had the orange bread french toast today (topped with strawberries and a side of orange syrup) which was fabulous too, and Chris got the strawberry chocolate chip pancakes covered in whipped cream and chocolate sauce. We actually arrived at the museum minutes before it opened and it was fabulous to have the place virtually all to ourselves for the first couple of minutes. When you first walk in you meet Sue, the largest complete T-Rex.
The first room we went through was called The Ancient Americas. It chronicled the native South and North Americas over the last 13,000 years. It covered the Mayans, Incas, Aztecs and more modern Native American Indians, and Inuits. Really fascinating stuff.
The costume on the right is what the women of the Yakima Native American tribe wore.
Next we went through the Ancient Egypt exhibit. There was a pyramid replica you walked through where they had an actual mummy and walls from a burial room. Then it opened up into bigger rooms of artifacts. One of the items were numerous pages from the Book of the Dead.
More mummys (all female!?)
And reliefs.
After going through numerous rooms about mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, the last big exhibit was about dinosaurs.
Me, comparing foot sizes with one of the dinosaurs.
Though we were having an excellent time at the Natural History Museum, we had to call it a day at 3:30 because we needed to hike back into downtown, have an early dinner and get to the Art Museum by 5:00 pm. It was definitely my favorite museum of the trip.

We stopped and had a snack of calamari at a pizza/pasta place around the corner from our hotel before heading over to the museum. During the summer they were offering free admission after 5:00 pm on Thursdays and Fridays. They were even staying open later, until 9:00 pm. When we got in we grabbed a map and made a bee line to the exhibits we knew we absolutely wanted to see like the Japanese Screens special exhibit. My favorites were these pair of fall and springs screens.
After the screens we beat feet over to the Impressionists. Here are a few of the highlights:
The last two paintings were the size of the whole wall. I had no idea they were so big. There was also Monet and Renoir, but none of my favorite pieces. We ended having time to go through the early and modern American art (O'Keefe, Whistler, and Winslow), ancient Roman and Egyptian art, and through a section about architecture and building.

We're starting to pack because we need to be on the El tomorrow morning around 7:30 am. We should be rolling into Chico between 4:30-5:00 pm tomorrow evening. It's been a great week, but we're ready to be home again. You can only eat out so many meals before you actually start to look forward to my cooking!