Chicago Air and Water Show 2008

A few weekends ago, Sean and I went to the Chicago Air and Water Show. Apparently the city puts this on every year, and people just flock from all around to see it. The water show was in the morning on both weekend days, and the air show went non-stop for the rest of the day until around 4:30 pm. A lot of the demonstrations centered around military planes, but there were many smaller, show planes whose pilots illustrated their aviation talents for the audience. 

Most of the activity was off of North Avenue on the beach, where vendors sold merchandise, and people brought lawn chairs and packed themselves all the way up to the water to watch the show. We hung out there for a while, and then, of course, I became claustrophobic with the excessive amounts of sweaty, smelly people. We meandered back across the freeway to a safer, less chaotic area, where we could still see what was going on. Sean was a little disappointed at not being able to hear the announcers telling us what everything was or what the pilots were doing, but he was a good sport about it. 

Mid-show, I decided that is would be fun to rent a paddle boat in the Lincoln Park Lagoon. We were still near the show and could see a little, and we had talked about it before when we were at the Lincoln Park Zoo. 

Ok...so I was a little bored.

Since we were already missing some fantastic plane action, I decided not to push the issue of renting a swan boat, so we just ventured out on our little green paddle boat. Sean entertained himself by chasing geese...Note the beady-eyed look of, "What do you think you are doing following me?" in the picture of the unfortunate goose, who we were paddling close after.

After 30 minutes of highly entertaining paddle boat-ing, we went back up to watch the air show from our spot that we had found. We got all settled in and waited for the really great stuff, because what air show would be complete without a finale from the Blue Angels (definitely my favorite part, second only to the stealth)? Chicago would tolerate nothing less.

(I got this last one off the internet. My zoom is definitely not that good.)