April 5, 2025
We took off for a road trip for the weekend. We are driving to Chicago to see Brooks and Dunn in concert! It is about a 5 hour drive and around 335 miles. We also have an hour time change during the drive. It was a nice pleasant drive for most of it. We were going to stop at Cracker Barrel and have dinner as Bill was craving the chicken and dumplings. We have passed a number of them on the way but when he decided he was hungry we couldn’t find a single one! We decided to stop at the Denny’s at the Flying J where we stopped for gas. It was pretty good. Note to our RV’ing friends, they don’t use the Good Sam club card any more for the discount.
When we were about 10 miles from the hotel we ran into stopped traffic. It took over an hour to get through that. We finally got to our hotel. How did we travel before GPS? We stayed at the Hyatt Place O’Hare Airport, which is right next door to the Allstate Arena which is where the show was. Our window looked out over the runways at the hotel. The sound proofing was pretty good and we couldn’t hear the planes. We rested for a bit and then headed over to the concert. I bought a bottle of water and would you believe it cost $6.50?!. They also took the lid off so you had to be really careful not to spill it. Our seats were ok, a little high but hey, it is music.
There were 2 opening acts. The first was a young woman and her band. The name was Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway.
The music was good, mostly blue grass. They performed for about 30 minutes.
The second act was David Lee Murphy.
I know he is mostly known for songwriting but he also performs. He has had a few hits. He performed for almost an hour. We really didn’t know the warmup acts would be for 2 hours before the headliners but once they got started it was great!
Most of the audience sang along with every song. Good thing too as Ronnie Dunn has had strep throat and Covid. I did notice he wasn’t holding his notes as long as normal and he had trouble hitting the high ones. But the show was really, really good.
After the show was walked back to the hotel. Let me tell you, that is the way to go. Book a hotel close to the theater so you don’t have to drive there and then try to get out of the parking lot after the show is over. We were in our room in just minutes. It was hard to go to sleep as I was still pumped up with the music.
Sunday morning we got up, got dressed and went down to breakfast. It was just a standard hotel buffet breakfast, nothing special. We went back to our room and finished packing. We were on the road by 10. At least we didn’t have any issues with traffic on our way home, just a long boring drive. We did stop for lunch/dinner at Cracker Barrel, to get Bill his chicken and dumplings. I had the chicken fried chicken but brought home half of it.
We arrived home just before 5:00 after stopping to fill my gas tank. It was interesting to see how it was warm in Chicago but got progressively colder on the drive home. We hit some minor showers in Indiana and Ohio. We finally arrived home and dumped the suitcase. We plan on doing the laundry tomorrow.
That was our latest adventure.