Our Adventure in Richpeopleland

Last Thursday, we got to live the high life by heading down to McCormick Place for the First Look for Charity for the Chicago Auto Show.

Since this was a big charity event, we had to get all dressed up, including a tux for me and a new dress for Michele. While Bella stayed at home to hang out with Grandma, we braved the traffic and fought our way to the show.

After sitting in traffic for 2 hours (yes, two hours), we finally arrived. As you can probably guess, Michele and I are not exactly car fanatics, we were mostly going for the fun of it and to see what kind of food and drinks they'd have. Plus there was a chance we could have won one of three cars, that was enough reason to go.

We did actually look at some cars while we were there though, since this may be the year my car finally kicks the bucket. We've had 11 great years together, so I got my money's worth from it at least. All I know that I want is a hybrid of some sort, so we spent most of our time searching out the limited selection of them.

The food selection was pretty fantastic though. We found plenty of great options the more we walked. We found some simple pastas and chicken and beef early on. As we moved on, we found a couple of tables with rack of lamb, baked brie cheese, sushi, and loads of other stuff. Of course we ended up spending loads of time near those tables. Still not sure which car manufacturer they were near, so you see where our priorities were.

Since the tickets were pretty pricey (thanks to my wife's company giving them away in a raffle), we were able to see and sit in some exotic cars we'd usually never even be allowed to touch, without the usual mob of thousands of people that would normally swarm around the same cars on the normal show days. Michele took her first opportunity to sit in one of the Jaguar models. Which one, you ask? No idea, the expensive one, that's my answer.

I decided to do the same as well, while we were at the BMW section, I decided to have a seat in a model that costs a mere $100,000. Don't worry, they immediately scrubbed the car down after a lowly person like myself exited it.

We then walked around more just to see what was there, and of course to see what other food and drinks we could easily find. As you could probably expect, the BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. areas were all swarmed with people. We decided to wander over to the Kia area for the heck of it, and we were literally the only people there. That was almost entirely the case when we went over to the GM area of the hall. Oh well.

While we were at the GM area, I did have to take a seat in my future mid-life crisis wheels, aka a Chevy Corvette. Aside from feeling like my ass was actually an inch off of the ground, it was well worth it.

After packing our guts with so much rack of lamb, we were nearly splitting at the seams, we decided to call it a night and head home. If we ever win tickets to the opening night again, we'll be there in a heartbeat, mainly to pocket as much rack of lamb and baked brie to enjoy for the next few days afterwards. Guess we should have brought some baggies with us, oh well.