Thursday is the only day after radiation that Suzanne doesn’t have other appointments; Doctors, bloodwork, nutritionist, or therapists. That means we got a full day of nothing to do after 7:45am so we decided to go to the Chicago Botanical Garden.

Neither of us has ever been there, although we do go to botanical gardens whenever we can. We enjoy walking the paths, looking at all the different plants, trees & flowers; and creating new ideas in our mind of what we want to do in our own botanical backyard garden.

The last garden we visited was the Naples Florida Botanical Garden. Walking through that garden was so different than what we usually see, it inspired us to add more tropical plants to our landscape. (Shout out to my classmate Brenda in Naples for sharing supper with us that same evening.)

We arrived at the Gardens around 11 am which was actually the time we were assigned to help space out visitors during the pandemic. Masks on the trails were optional if you could maintain a distance from other visitors. We were early enough that the park wasn’t too crowded at this point.

I don’t think we missed an area: Aquatic garden where we found a new water lily to order; Bonsai collection where one of the trees was over 150 years old (and we thought our 20-year-old one was unique); English garden; Oak Meadow; and the Rose garden which was probably Suzanne’s favorite.

Halfway through we grabbed lunch, $9 Brats (Chicago ya know), and then finished the other gardens. I was too cheap to pay the additional fee to see the model railroad garden and the Greenhouses were closed because people would be too close to each other. Overall, it was much larger than I expected. We were there for about 4 hours and Suzanne registered 15k steps on her Fitbit.

The gardens are pretty far north of Chicago, even north of Evanston where Vogue Fabric Store is located. So I asked the rhetorical question, “do you want to go to Vogue while we are in the area?” I didn’t have to wait for the answer as a smile came to her face, so off we went.

After her fabric rush was over, we headed back to our tiny apartment. Since we were so close to the lake when we headed south, we took Lakeshore Drive for a much more scenic view. All in all, a great day for the wife.

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.
1 Corinthians 3:7

You can see what we saw by viewing our photo album here.