When you are finished eating, head back upstairs and cross the river. If you are lucky, the bridge will be temporarily raised for some water traffic. Regardless, take in the views both east to the lake and west inland.
Millennium Park begins at Michigan and Randolph, although most of the action is a little further south, closer to Madison. If it's warm, this place will be hopping. Don't miss The Bean (you'll know it when you see it) or the giant projection fountains. Get your feet wet ? you've done plenty of walking already, and there's plenty more ahead of you. (If you were hoping to have your kids burn off any excess energy, let them go buckwild in the fountain.)
Then continue down Michigan to Adams, where two lions guard the entrance of the world-renowned Art Institute of Chicago. (Admission is $18 for adults, $12 for children and seniors. If this is a Thursday afternoon and you're running late, you're in luck: admission is free after 5:30PM.) Choose a couple areas of interest and check those out; perusing the whole collection would take you the better part of the day. There are some iconic American paintings (Wood's "American Gothic" and Hopper's "Nighthawks") and a number of seminal European paintings (most notably Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte").
Once you're finished browsing, continue south on Michigan to Congress Parkway. At the corner are the colossal stone walls of The Auditorium Theatre, designed by the great Louis Sullivan (with Frank Lloyd Wright toiling as his apprentice), once the tallest building in Chicago. A tour or a show here is well worth the cost, if you can arrange it. Have a look inside the grand lobby and the staircase if it's open, and leave before someone kicks you out.
Turn around and head back north for two blocks to Jackson, and then turn left. In the sky are the looming black metal blocks of the Sears Tower. Until recently the tallest building in the world, it now carries that title only for North America. If you didn't go to the Hancock Observatory earlier, you can have a look from the SkyDeck at the Sears (Willis) Tower instead ($17.00 adult, $11.00 child). It's probably late in the afternoon by now, and most Chicagoans are beginning their commute home. The streets of the Loop will be full of the rumble of elevated trains and the air of people who are tired from a full day's work.
This is Chicago.
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Along the Magnificent Mile Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.
