A New Experience

Well I previously mentioned that just exploring Chicago was a new experience for me, but contained in this new experience was another new experience (get used to that phrase...I may use it a lot!). See, Ange is from a small town in Indiana and hasn't done much traveling. She's gone a few places randomly but not to any degree that I've been fortunate to have experienced. I have been lucky that I have had many opportunities through both work and school to travel what I would say extensively. So on top of having this new experience of exploring a new city together I got the double excitement of showing my lady love how to live it up in a little bit of style.

So when we decided to go to Chicago we started checking out hotels on Priceline and Hotels.com to see where might be cool, yet not too expensive, to stay. I was stalking some hotels in the Lincoln Park area...semi-near the area of the concert. I couldn't get any cheap deals. I started my bids at $50 and worked my way all the way up to $80 before I said boo to that plan. We then decided that maybe it wouldn't matter so much where we stayed since we were going to explore the whole town. So I picked a few other areas to try my bids but I increased my star level to 3. I went with a $60 bid to start off. I didn't get one, but Priceline told me that they had a hotel if I was willing to increase my bid by $17. $77 for a 3 star hotel isn't bad so I went for it. Priceline went through the little process and told me that I won a FOUR star hotel in the heart of downtown! Excellent! We ended up at the Palmer House Hilton, a very elegant hotel near the Art Institute of Chicago and Millennium Park. Not too shabby for $77. I do have to say however, that they must be able to clearly tell that we paid cheaply for it. We got stuck in a weird back section of the hotel that wasn't the most desirable section of the hotel. They must have kept the really good rooms for the schmucks who paid the ful $289 a night. BUT, a 4 star "worse" room is way better than the best room at most 1 or 2 star hotels.

So this was exciting for a few reasons. First, it was a 4 star hotel. My darling has never stayed in a 4 star hotel so she was excited as hell about that in and of itself. Secondly, because she had never stayed in a 4 star hotel she hadn't experienced all the amenities that came with the 4 star experience. This included valet parking, bell hop service, concierge, and much more. Just watching her delight in all these cool things was enough to make the trip worth it for me.

More about the trip in the next installments.

My darling overcome with excitement about the hotel.

Waiting for the valet on checkout.