Are you looking for a fun family adventure within driving distance from St. Louis? Look no further than Chicago (a 5 hour drive)!! We visited my family in Milwaukee for Thanksgiving this year and wanted to take our daughters to Chicago for a little mini-vacation beforehand. My 5 year old has been wanting to either visit Chicago or South America (she learned about both in school). Out of these two, my husband and I thought Chicago was a little more doable, ha!
We planned most of our trip with CityPASS, a fantastic way to save money on attractions in lots of cities. This was our four daughters’ first time exploring the city, so we were excited to check out as many attractions and museums as we could fit in. You can save a whopping 48% on regular admission prices, which was so great for our family. I downloaded the free CityPASS app and it was super easy to select my tickets of what attractions we chose. When we arrived at an attraction, I just pulled up our app and we were good to go to show our tickets!
Our 4-Day Chicago Itinerary
Day 1:
Drove to Chicago
Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo (free)
The Farm-in-the-Zoo (free)
Checked into our hotel (Loews Chicago Hotel)
Walked from our hotel to the Shoreline Sightseeing Architecture River Tour
(We timed this just as the sun was setting, which I recommend because the city lights were beautiful)!
Day 2:
Sloomoo Institute
American Girl Doll Store & Cafe (ate lunch with my girls’ dolls)
Museum of Ice Cream
Swam in our hotel indoor pool
Day 3:
Skydeck Chicago
The Bean
Maggie Daley Park
Christkindl Market
Day 4:
Check out of Loews Chicago Hotel
Shedd Aquarium
Field Museum
Museum of Science and Industry
Drive to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving!
In this blog, I’ll share 5 of our attractions that we chose through CityPASS. I partnered with CityPASS for this trip, which I was so thankful for. I highly recommend them as a company! Everything was seamless for booking attractions. I’ll share the other attractions in another blog post.
Shoreline Sightseeing Architecture River Tour
Since this was our girls’ first trip to Chicago, we wanted to choose something that would give them a view of the city. This boat tour was just incredible! Our tour was at 4:45pm, which I highly recommend! We arrived as the sun was setting and then we were blown away by the lights of the city as the boat moved throughout the city. Many buildings had Christmas lights up too! This was a 60 minute tour with a guide speaking through the history and architecture of Chicago. The guide was very knowledgeable and we learned a lot!
There is a deck on the top of the boat with benches and chairs. We brought out all of our winter gear (my girls wore their snowsuits) and it was really needed with the wind and cooler weather. Stairs lead to the cabin with a cafe to order hot chocolate and some other snacks. There are restrooms around the corner too. At the front of the boat was a small viewing area and you could still hear the guide over the speaker.
I think my favorite part of the tour was reaching Lake Michigan and then the boat slowly turned for us to take in the view of the whole Chicago skyline at night. It was so incredible!
Skydeck Chicago
We saw Chicago by boat and then Chicago from Willis Tower the next day! Skydeck is located in Willis Tower, which is the third-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. This is the highest observation deck in the United States!! We rode the elevator up to the 103rd floor and then viewed Chicago from the observation windows. Luckily, we had a clear and sunny day, so we saw buildings pretty far out!
This location was where I was extremely thankful we had the CityPASS. There was an expedited line so we didn’t need to wait in the line for the elevator. After we took our time observing through the windows, we walked to the Ledge (also on the 103rd floor). The Ledge is made up of 5 glass floor balconies with 1.5 inches of thick glass! You can look straight down and see how tall we were–it was crazy! The Ledge is included with admission and there was a separate line for CityPASS holders too! We were able to go to the Ledge three times with our tickets and skip the lines. Each party gets 90 seconds for photos, so it was nice we could go more than once.
Shedd Aquarium
I have such fond memories of visiting Shedd Aquarium when I was younger. This is the 3rd largest aquarium in the Western Hemisphere (after the Georgia Aquarium & Monterey Bay Aquarium). There are 32,600 different species of sea life at Shedd and you could easily spend all day here! First we walked to the Abbott Oceanarium where we saw Beluga whales swimming close by. You can view the whales and dolphins above water, but you can also take the stairs down to view them from under water! The penguins, sea otters and starfish are downstairs too.
We saw one of the free Aquatic shows, which happened to be on dolphins! This was a fantastic show. Another favorite section was the Wild Reef. I recommend hopping in line for this right away, because there is an elevator ride to arrive at the Wild Reef. This leads to the sharks in its own underground wing. There are 540 species of life shown in this public display!
Field Museum
Next to Shedd Aquarium is the Field Museum. The Field Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum in Chicago. It is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. It has more than 24 million objects and explores more than 4.6 billion years of history!!
Here are two of our favorite exhibits we saw:
The Evolving Planet:
View SUE, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered! They have both fossils and casts of MANY dinosaurs and animals. The exhibit starts with single-celled organisms and walks through the years and stages of history until early humans.
Inside Ancient Egypt:
This exhibit explores a burial chamber that dates back to 2400 BC! There are 23 human mummies and 30 animal mummies. There are floor-to-ceiling hieroglyphs too!
Museum of Science and Industry
Located in the only remaining building from the 1893’s World’s Fair, this is the largest science museum in the Western Hemisphere. There are hundreds of exhibits and 35,000 artifacts!! We loved walking beside the WWII German U-Boat (only one of five remaining U-boats in the world) and exploring through the mirror maze. One of the neatest things we did was descend into the mine shaft! We loved learning about the technology and history of coal mining.
Because we went during the winter season, we loved seeing the “Christmas Around the World” exhibit. There are more than 50 Christmas trees decorated! Each tree is decorated by a different country. It was so interesting to learn about different customs and traditions!
Overall, we just loved these Chicago attractions and museums. I felt like there was so much more to learn and discover here. We can’t wait to return as a family again soon!
