Some travel days are about slowing down. This was not one of them. We set out to see how much of Chicago we could pack into a single day: a comic convention, the Shedd Aquarium, a water taxi across the river, and Navy Pier. By the end Fabiola had been scared half to death in a funhouse and we'd covered more miles on foot than most of our hiking days. Here's how it went.
Starting at C2E2
The day started at C2E2, the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo at McCormick Place. Neither of us is a hardcore convention person, which honestly made it more fun. The cosplay alone is worth the ticket: people spend months on these costumes and the level of detail is absurd. We wandered artist alley, watched people who clearly knew what they were doing haggle over back issues, and took in the sheer scale of the show floor. McCormick Place is the largest convention center in North America and C2E2 fills it. If you go, wear real shoes.
Riding the Metra
Getting around was half the adventure. We took the Metra, Chicago's commuter rail, which for two people who mostly travel by truck felt like a cheat code. No parking, no traffic, just a double-decker train car and watching the city slide by. If you're visiting Chicago without a car, the trains genuinely cover most of what a tourist wants to do.
The Shedd Aquarium and the dolphin show
The Shedd Aquarium sits right on the lakefront on the Museum Campus, and it earns its reputation. The Caribbean Reef tank in the rotunda alone could eat an hour. But the dolphin show was the highlight. The presentation runs in an amphitheater with floor-to-ceiling windows behind the pool, so the dolphins jump against a backdrop of open Lake Michigan. Fabiola was fully a kid again for the entire show, and Nathan's camera roll from those twenty minutes is mostly blurry dorsal fins and one perfect jump.
Water taxi to Navy Pier
Instead of another train, we crossed to Navy Pier on a Shoreline Sightseeing water taxi. It's transportation priced like transportation but it works like a mini architecture cruise: you get the skyline from the water, wind in your face, and you dock right at the pier. If you're already going that direction, it beats a rideshare on every axis except rain.
The funhouse incident
Navy Pier at night is carnival energy, and that's where we found Amazing Chicago's Funhouse Maze. On paper it's a family attraction. In practice, mirrored corridors, strobe rooms, and a spinning vortex tunnel reduced Fabiola to gripping Nathan's arm and negotiating with the building. Nathan laughed his way through it, which has been noted and will be repaid. The vortex tunnel is the boss level: the walkway is stable but the spinning walls convince your brain it isn't, and your legs vote with the walls.
What we'd tell you
One day in Chicago is enough for a highlight reel, not the city. But if a highlight reel is what you have time for, this route worked: convention in the morning, aquarium in the afternoon, water to the pier for the evening. Feet will complain. Worth it.
Watch the dolphins, the maze, and the meltdown: watch the full video on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.