Congrats Fan! Since you were the first to respond with the correct answer, you are the winner and I hereby declare you Queen for the day!! All hail Queen Tiffany!! Make sure you let Donny know so that he treats you extra special ;) I don't know what the heck you were doing up checking blogs at 3:30 AM (maybe little Dock had something to do with that?) - but aren't you glad you did?!!!
Thanks to everyone for playing! Now that the game is over, I've posted everyone's comments if you want to see the other guesses.
Once again, above is the pic I took at the Home Alone house. Cool, huh?! I thought it was pretty exciting to get to see it in person. Below is a still from the movie so you can see that I'm not yankin' your chain (anyone know where that saying came from - "yankin' your chain"? - I don't think I've ever spelled that out before - it looks funny).
And this is the house right across the street. Lindsay says that this is the house Kevin runs to at the end of the movie - remember with all the water? I haven't watched the movie in a LONG time so I can't verify that - but definitely I'm going to watch it this year and check it out.
And this is the church from the movie. Pretty cool.
You can go to this website to see pics of and read more about this famous house. After seeing it in person, it was kind of fun to read about it. Apparently, a lot of the indoor scenes from the movie were actually filmed at a nearby high school.
One of the things I was most impressed with while in The Windy City (sidenote: I didn't think it was that windy. For being nicknamed "The Windy City" I expected 50+ mph winds. Come on! Needless to say I was unimpressed with the wind. Burley is a lot more windy.) That was a long sidenote - let's start over:
One of the things I was most impressed with while in The Wind-less City was the houses. I love just driving around and looking at houses and it was especially fun to do this in the suburbs surrounding Chicago. There were neighborhoods full of these cute houses from the early 1900's, all of them in mint condition. I'm sure the interiors have been updated, but the exteriors looked just like they would have when they were built. And each one had it's own personal style to it, which I love. One of my pet peeves about houses being built today is that they all look very similar. You drive through a neighborhood and every house looks like the one next door. Some neighborhoods even have rules about your property, like your fence has to be a certain color or made out of a certain material, etc. All of these houses were so unique, yet they all fit together - does that make sense? You can tell they were built around the same time. Here's some pics I took to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:
I kind of took these pics as an afterthought while we were driving down the road, so they are definitely not great quality, but they give you an idea of what I'm talking about. This was in a ritzier neighbor, so not all of them were this big, but they all had this old, early 1900's look and feel to them. There were some neighborhoods where all of the garages were detached and tucked behind the houses so that from the front view all you saw was house, and in order to access your garage you had to drive through the alley. It was also where you kept your garbage bins so on pickup day, the garbage truck just drives down the alley. I LOVE this! That's another pet peeve - houses where the garage is the prominent feature; I loved that they were tucked behind the houses. Some of the streets were even made out of brick (or cobblestone? I don't know exactly) which was so cool. It wasn't the smoothest thing to drive on, but it was very picturesque :)
