This week I will go over some more locations I visited while living in Chicago.

At 100 stories tall, the Hancock Building is one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city—the 4th tallest to be precise. At the top is an observatory which one can visit to get a nice view of the city. Some people claim that it’s the better of the 2 observatories (the other being the Sears Tower) to visit since you are a little more removed from downtown and can therefore see downtown a bit easier. I think both are fine and have their own appeal.Chicago: Hancock Building, Sears Tower & Alder Planetarium

 

I was blessed with a relatively clear day and managed to get a good glimpse of the city. After visiting the Hancock Building, I just walked around downtown for a while until it got dark.

I ended up walking all the way out to the Alder Planetarium, which was closed by the time I got there. The skyline from there was quite impressive, though.

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Later that year, my brother flew out to Chicago to visit me for New Year’s, and while he was here we discovered some other things together.

One of the first places we went to was the last place I tried to unsuccessfully get into—the Alder Planetarium!

 

There was of course lots more to see but quite a bit of it was dark (and therefore didn’t show up very well in my photos). The main attraction also happened to be an impressive movie about the creation of our universe, but I obviously couldn’t take pictures of that very well.

While the planetarium was pretty cool, I don’t recall it having anything that put it leagues above any other planetarium I have visited. Check it out if you have the time or have never been to a planetarium before, but I wouldn’t go too far out of my way to visit it if you have been to one before.

Since the weather was nice and crisp, we then decided to make our way over to the Sears Tower.

Note that I keep calling it the Sears Tower, and not the Willis Tower, as it is now officially titled since 2009. I don’t have a particular reason for doing so; a lot of people still call it by its original name and I simply jumped on the bandwagon.

Regardless, the Sears Tower is the tallest building in Chicago and still the 2nd tallest in the USA, only recently surpassed by the new World Trade Center, One World Trade Center. The other 2 buildings in between the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower are the Aon Center (3rd tallest) and the Trump Tower (2nd tallest).

The Sears Tower also has an observatory at the top of the tower, but this one also has 2 “ledges,” which are simply glass boxes that stick out of the side of the building that you can stand in and look directly at the ground below your feet, about 1,400 feet (440 meters) below.

 

 

 

Not sure where else to go, I took my brother to the Millennium Park and showed him that area before we headed home for the day since we did quite a bit of walking by that point.

In a couple weeks I will show some more things my brother and I did while he was visiting me, so stay tuned!