A Night at the Field Museum in Chicago

Two days had passed since the United Center and Millennium Park. Thursday I was back in presentations, and the evening wrapped with a quick peek at the Sheryl Crow concert — I’ll be honest, I only know about three of her songs, but the crowd was into it.

Friday had more presentations. The food situation had been improving steadily — the first couple of days were forgettable, but by Thursday we had steak and shrimp. Friday started with barbecue, cornbread, and mac and cheese. The cornbread especially. I wasn’t expecting to have feelings about cornbread in Chicago but here we are.

The main event Friday night: the Field Museum.

Charter Buses and a Drum Line

The convention organized it properly. A few dozen charter buses lined up outside McCormick Place to take everyone over. We boarded ours and immediately realized it was nicer than expected — leather seats, party bus energy, the whole thing.

When the bus pulled up to the Field Museum, there was a drum line out front going full send. The boys were already locked in before we even got through the doors.

The group had reserved a large section of the museum for the evening — private access, performers and entertainers set up throughout, and yes, an open bar. Not a bad Friday night.

Night at the Museum

One of the boys’ favorite movies growing up was Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller. Walking into that grand hall — Sue the T-Rex, the elephant, the pterosaur hanging overhead, all of it lit up in orange and blue with leaf patterns projected across the ceiling — I could see why it hit the same way.

The scale of the main hall is something you don’t fully appreciate until you’re standing in it. The Stanley Field Hall has been there since 1921, and the ceilings are high enough to fit a full-size dinosaur with room to spare.

The Dinosaur Exhibits

I’ll admit I put the phone away for most of the night — I wanted to actually experience it, not just document it. But we spent a good stretch in the dinosaur galleries.

The T-Rex display under colored lighting was genuinely striking. They’ve got multiple specimens, and the side-profile view of the full skeleton gives you a real sense of the size.

We wandered through human evolution, found the Triceratops, and generally let the kids lead. That’s the right call at a natural history museum with no time pressure and no crowds — the private buyout meant we could actually move around freely.

The Field Museum is one of the best natural history museums in the world, and getting it mostly to ourselves for an evening was a genuinely special thing. Worth every hour of convention presentations to get there.

The next morning I had a few hours before the flights home — and I used them to get up to the 360 CHICAGO observation deck.