(Catching up? Read Day 1 and Day 2 of my cross-country road trip from Washington to Connecticut!)
After crossing through the Minnesota border late at night on Day 2, I continued to drive for another hour and a half before pulling over at a rest stop to spend the night.
Spending the night at a rest stop hasn’t been fun, but it’s been great at saving us some money and letting us maximize our time driving. Early in the morning, Mister E woke up to take over at the wheel. I was a bit cranky having to wake up so early, but at least we got to watch a beautiful sunset over the Eastern horizon.
After a few hours in the car, we were ready for breakfast! Since we had been coming in under our food budget for the past two days, we decided to splurge a little on sit down places for the day. We stopped at a Perkins where I got a veggie omelet filled with tomatoes, spinach, onions, and peppers. On the side, I had a small bowl of fruit and a monstrous blueberry muffin.
Once back on the road, we made it out of Minnesota pretty quickly and crossed into Wisconsin.
After driving for a while, I convinced Mister E to pull over for a pit stop at Starbucks. I ordered an iced skinny cinnamon dolce latte and tried one of their cake pops for the very first time.
I wish I could have tried both the tiramisu and birthday cake flavors, but since I only wanted one, I decided on the tiramisu. I absolutely loved it and thought it was the perfect size for a little treat.
After our afternoon snack, I took over at the wheel and drove straight into Illinois.
Of course we couldn’t go through Illinois without doing a little sightseeing in the Windy City – Chicago!
We only had a couple hours to spend in the city, so I made sure to just hit the highlights. We first visited Millennium Park which is famous for its reflective bean sculpture.
After visiting the bean, we walked around the city a bit, but were deterred by the chilly wind.
I had told Mister E that I wanted to try a Chicago style deep dish pizza while I was in the city, so he took me to Giordano’s, one of Chicago’s famous places for deep dish pizza.
We ordered the small super veggie stuffed pizza with ground beef on half for Mister E.
Honestly, I was a little disappointed with everything. It was over a half hour wait for our food, which the waiter did warn us about. By the time our food came out, we were starving and were disappointed to see that our pizza had Canadian bacon on it. The server apologized and offered to get us a new pizza, but we didn’t have the time and our stomach’s didn’t have the patience to wait for a new pie to come out. Our server made sure that we weren’t charged for the bacon and gave us our sodas for free. For the hassle of trying to dig out all of the bacon out of my pizza though, I would have been happier if he offered us a complimentary dessert.
The slices were huge and I was only able to eat one before throwing in the towel. The pizza was good although I was a bit underwhelmed by it. For being so famous, I was expecting something mind-blowing but instead kept thinking that the crust tasted like Pilsbury dough and that I could probably easily recreate the pizza at home.
After our early dinner, we braved the cold winds once more to make it back to our car and headed to Indiana with me behind the wheel.
I managed to get about three-quarters of the way through Indiana before stopping for the night. Since we stayed at a rest stop the night before, we decided to stay at a hotel so we could take proper showers and enjoy the comforts of a real bed.
We’re supposed to make it to Connecticut by the end of today, so check back tomorrow for a recap of Day Four (the last day) of our roadtrip!
I grew up in Chicago and Giordano’s is really not good at all.. More hype than good food so I don’t blame you for your disappointment at all. Durango’s in WI is awesome (who knew Racine could have awesome pizza?)but unfortunately you are are well past there