Mini Vacation

I get a lot of perks with Cody's job.  He gets the opportunities to do a lot of stuff, that would be considered research or whatever for the restaurant he works at, plus his boss tries to do things so that he can show him that his hard work is appreciated.  For example, his Christmas present in 2010 was a free trip to Florida for a few days.  They have a condo in Fort Myers, so he paid for our plane tickets, and we got a free trip to Florida.  It was awesome!

So this week, the National Restaurant Association Restaurant Show was going on in Chicago.  It's this HUGE event, where vendors come to sell their stuff, and restaurant workers/owners/managers will come and try to find new things for their restaurant.  Cody and I came last year, and we got to come again this year.  It was all paid for - his boss paid for the gas, hotel, show tickets, etc.  All we had to pay for was food, and any other fun stuff we wanted to do. 

The show runs Saturday-Tuesday, but since our days off are only Monday and Tuesday, we decided to wait until Monday to come to chicago.  We also took Wednesday off, and made it a long "weekend" for us.  We went to the show yesterday, which was so awesome! It took us about 5 hours to get through it.  There were so many different companies there.  Everything from PB2, to floor cleaners, companies that sell ovens and dishwashers, plates and glasses, food trucks, to almost every type of food you can imagine.  We got so much free food and samples, it was insane!  We got to see Mike Isabella from Top Chef do a cooking demo.  It was so much fun, but we walked SO MUCH.  We were super tired by the end, and we still had about a 1/4 of the way to go.  We decided that we'd go to our hotel and hang out for a bit, before we were meeting with my best friend who lives in Chicago. 

Our hotel is awesome.  Except I'm pretty sure the whole point of the hotel is to film porno's in it haha.  The room has no windows.  We have this huge, king size bed, jacuzzi tub, steam shower. It's awesome.  My friends sister kept calling it "the boom boom room" lol.  It was great to go back to the room though, because I had such sore feet, so I got in and took a nice long bath in the jacuzzi tub!  We met my friend and her sister for dinner at one of those create-your-own stir fry places.  I ate a lot, but it was mostly veggies and pretty healthy!  We went to target afterwards for a minute, before coming home and crashing because we were so tired.

Today, we got up early with the intention on going back downtown to the food show, but we started watching the news and they were saying that from our hotel to the place the show was at, even though it was only 20 miles, it would take an hour and a half to get there!  We decided that since we didn't have that much to see at the show, we would just skip today and do some shopping, and relax a bit.  So we started the day by going to Ikea, where I got some awesome stuff. I'm excited to get back home to put it all to use!  Then we went to a mall and just kind of walked around a bit.  We ate at Potbelly, which is a sandwich shop for lunch, and a burger place called Meathead for dinner.  It was all super good!  We are discussing going to a movie later, but I kind of want to get in the bathtub again. I wish I had a tub like this at home!!! 

We are making our way back home tomorrow, but we decided that since we don't really have anywhere to be, we're going to take our time getting home.  There's some outlet shops on the way home, and a casino we may stop at.  I am so happy that I got to spend a few days with my husband! It's so good to spend time with him, since we don't get to spend a ton of time together.  I didn't exercise the entire time I was here, and I didn't really try to eat all that well. I know that someday I'll have to start making great choices while I'm on vacation, but I have been looking forward to this trip for a long time and didn't know how to track all of the samples that I was going to be eating.  I'm gonna get right back on track on Thursday though!!