Chicago

When we first started this trip, Jim’s maiden voyage having fully metamorphosed into a motorhome, we were cautious about boondocking in big cities. Even from the start, we were happy to park on the side of the road in smaller towns, and off the road when out in the boonies, but it took us a while to build up the confidence to do the same when in cities. In Miami and New Orleans, cities which we visited within a month of leaving England, we elected to stay at RV parks. But on entering Chicago, more than seven months later, we had developed a good enough understanding of what we can and cannot get away with, to feel confident parked on the side of the road.

Chicago may have one of the highest gun crime rates per capita in the USA, but like all cities, there are safe areas and troubled areas. Not knowing Chicago at all, it took us a short while to find a suitable parking spot in a nice area, but we soon settled on Skinner Park. The park is in the well-heeled West Loop area, and is a two mile cycle ride into town, or 5 minutes on the L train. It turned out to be a great place to explore the city from, and it wasn’t until nearly a week later that we had any problems parked where we were.

We stayed in Chicago for more than two weeks, and could easily have spent another two without seeing half of the attractions that Chicago has to offer. It sounds cheesy, but for me, almost every day was a highlight; Chicago is culturally world-class, and, there are few cities that I have enjoyed spending time in more. I understand that the last few years have seen heavy redevelopment, but to a tourist new to the city, it is a fantastic place to visit. The good transit system, the host of fantastic parks from the centre to the suburbs, the clean and picturesque beaches, the multitude of free festivals throughout the summer, the fantastic live music scene, and the awesome restaurants, all mean that it is a difficult city not to enjoy.

On our first few days in Chicago, we explored the central Loop and Near North areas with the huge sky scrapers, parks and cultural centres that characterise the city.

We spent most of our first day in the Chicago Art Institute, and still failed to see more than half of the gallery space. It is easy for a European to think of London, Paris, Florence or Rome, as the centre of the world’s great art collections, but there are few galleries that I have visited with collections as significant as the art institute. The gallery covers almost every period of art history, and has important pieces in all of its areas. During our visit, I remember staring at pieces by Caravaggio, Constable, Lichtenstein, Manet, Miro, Monet, Picaso, Pollock, Rothko, Turner, Warhol, and many, many others. If it hadn’t been for the entry fee, and the abundance of other places that we wanted to visit, I would gladly has spent another two days there.

On our second day in Chicago’s downtown, we took a walk along the Navy Pier, Chicago’s most visited tourist attraction. In a city filled to bursting point with galleries, museums and parks, it was disheartening to learn that the most visited attraction is a tacky mall with a smattering of overpriced bars and restaurants. The pier was distinctly underwhelming, but the experience was not wasted. A local church group had overbought tickets for a boat cruise on Lake Michigan, and invited us to join them. We spent the next two hours eating an excellent buffet lunch, and admiring the view of Chicago’s skyline in the sunshine on the deck of a boat.

Over the next few days, we visited as many of Chicago’s varied neighbourhoods as we could fit in, including Bucktown, Wicker Park, Pilsen, Lake View, Lincoln Park, Hyde Park, West Loop and Greek Town. All had elements that made them worth visiting, but Bucktown and Wicker Park kept us occupied for the longest, with the abundance of independent shops, great bars, restaurants, and live music. Quimby’s on North Avenue in Wicker Parks had the best collection of radical and anarchic zines and books I’ve ever seen, and the shop kept us occupied on its own for several hours.

As is often the case, the longer we spent parked in one place, the more interesting people we met, and Skinner Park was no exception. After nearly a week we bumped into Kevin, a great guy who lives locally and runs a business renting RVs to the film and entertainment businesses in Chicago; he kindly offered to let us stay in his nearby yard and use all of the power and water we needed. Happy where we were, but liking the idea of refilling the water tank, we agreed that we’d get in touch in a few days. The following day, after leaving the truck for a couple of hours to visit a nearby neighbourhood, we returned to the truck to find two police cars, a fire truck, and an animal control van parked alongside, with a crowd of men in uniform talking. Someone had seen Boris standing in the cab watching the world go by, and had decided that he was in mortal danger of overheating, whilst enclosed in our insulated motorhome (with several windows and skylights ajar). The firemen were busy discussing how they might get into the vehicle to rescue the dog, when we returned and ruined and their fun. We showed a few men in uniform around the cool and shaded interior of the truck, let Boris jump on them to show that he was alive and healthy, gave our details to a few people, and spent the next hour shooting the breeze with some interested policemen.

The incident ended well, and everybody left happy, if slightly bemused, but not wishing to incite any more chaos, we called Kevin the next morning. A week after we arrived in Chicago we moved into his yard, and tucked ourselves into a corner alongside two make-up vehicles that started life as mobile classrooms in New York. Kevin has a great array of vehicles, and I had fun poring over everything from a 40 foot tag-axle diesel pusher, to a totally stock 70’s Winnebago, complete with small-block V8.

Almost immediately upon moving into Kevin’s yard, the amount of drinking and eating increased, and the following week was much fun as I remember having in a long time. We watched the White Sox play at the US Cellular Field, saw a 70s rock band at Reggies Bar, watched lots of great jazz in the Pritzker pavilion for the annual Chicago Jazz Festival, drank Malort at a heavy metal bar, ate many brunches and BBQs, and spent a lot of time distracting Kevin from running his business. Kevin showed us an unbelievable level of hospitality, invited us into his home, and gave us the run of all the equipment in his yard.

Not wishing to pass up on an opportunity, I used the forklift to lift our generator off of the chassis brackets on Jim and into the workshop/warehouse. The generator has worked fine on the few occasions that we’ve use it since we moved into Jim, but one of the joints in the fuel system has been weeping and after using the generator for a while, diesel starts dripping onto the floor. The Pramac P4500 generator came fitted with a fuel tank which fed diesel via gravity to the injection pump. To allow the generator to fit under the truck, and to give it a (massively) extended running time, I removed the fuel tank and plumbed the generator straight into the 250 litre auxiliary tank on Jim. The injection pump refused to suck the fuel out of the tank and so I fitted a small electric pump to lift the fuel out of the tank. The added pressure was clearly too much for one of the joints.

The leak was fairly easy to find after taking the two side panels off of the generator, and was caused by a badly crimped fitting that I’d installed when I replaced the short hose from the fitted fuel tank, with a longer one. Thankfully all of the other fittings seemed to have coped fine with the increased pressure in the fuel lines. Predictably, the leak had resulted in a massive mess in the base of the enclosure, and I spent an hour cleaning diesely mud out before I could start putting things back together. With the generator off the truck, and in a clean workshop, I took the opportunity to change the oil, recommended by Yanmar at 20 hours, and then every 100-200 hours thereafter.

After a week spent visiting Chicago from the comfort of Kevin’s yard, we were ready once again to hit the road, and had to say sad farewell to a new friend. Our next major waypoint was Boston, and until recently we had been undecided about whether to head south of Lake Erie, through Indiana and Ohio, or head north, passing through Michigan and Ontario (Canada). Whilst in Chicago, I received an email from a cousin who had been left with a paid-for trip to Toronto, and so we happily agreed to meet him there, looking forward to seeing a familiar face again. This pretty much decided the next part of our route, and after topping off our water tank, we drove a short journey east around Lake Michigan, headed for Michigan’s beautiful Gold Coast.