Chicago!

This summer Cory did an internship at United Stationers, "a leading North American Wholesale Distributor of business products, with 2010 net sales of $4.8 billion." (http://www.unitedstationers.com/profile/overview.html) Cory's position was in the finance department and he was able to work closely with the CFO on a project designed to improve United Stationer's shareholder value.

United Stationer's is located in Deerfield, IL, a city just 30 minutes north of Chicago. Cory and I had both never been to Chicago so we enjoyed a summer exploring together. In order to maintain my job I worked part time and flew to Chicago 4 times to be with Cory.

Our favorite part of the summer was taking a river boat tour via the Chicago Architecture Foundation. A guide taught us about the history and Architecture of each magnificent building we passed. In the collage above on the leftyou can see the Willis Tower (formerly known as the Sears Tower) and is the tallest building in America at 108 stories. In the middle you can see Union station and on the right is The Wrigly Building. We loved seeing the juxtaposition of both modern and traditional architecture along the river.

Besides seeing the Skyline, we of course had to sample the famous Chicago pizza! It was good, but not our favorite, probably because the slab of cheese on top!



We did enjoy a restaurant called Big Bowl though! We ate there 3 or 4 times over the summer! They had the best curry and Chinese food!














We also spent a lot of time at this deluxe gym that came with Cory's internship! It was the type of gym that had towels, shampoo, and saunas!



























The northern suburbia of Chicago has an impressive collection of forest preserves. Cory and I tried "hiking" around them but found that it was either way to hot and humid or cool but buggy!













This was our apartment complex with was also provided from United Stationers!










One night we made a fort out of the furniture and ate our dinner inside it while we watched a movie!






Overall it was a wonderful summer. We met a lot of great people in our ward and other families who were doing their internship at United Stationers. We had many barbeque's and potlucks with them! Despite being separated we still survived! It helped to get cute pictures drawn from Cory.......And of course Bette kept Erin quite busy by hiking and biking!