Flying high! Helicopter Tour of Chicago: 9-21-2013

For Taber's birthday back in April I bought him a Groupon to do a helicopter tour of Chicago. Somehow the date to do the tour kept getting push back due to weather, helicopter maintenance, travel conflicts, etc…Finally 5 months later, we got to do the tour. It was definitely worth the wait and the awesomest way to see the city I could imagine!

We met up with the pilot and took one last pic on the tarmac before taking to the skies.

I was nervous at first but it was an incredibly smooth ride, much easier than a small airplane. Taber was fascinated by every aspect of flying and had lots of questions for our pilot. He was amazed by how different it was from the small planes he flew when he was getting his private pilot's license. He really liked being up there in the cockpit and was all smiles the whole time. 

It was fun to see big landmarks like the stadium from the sky

 Also so cool that we could weave through the skyscrapers and could actually see the people out on the sky decks at the Willis tower.

 While we were in the air we saw tons of people gathered at the beach for some event, so we decided to go check it out when we were done. 

 When we got down there we found out that it was the Red Bull flugtag, which is basically an event where people attempt to fly their homemade human powered flying machines off a pier about 30 feet high into the lake.  Sounded like fun so we decided to stay for a bit. 

 There were TONS of people there which made me very glad that we didn't have our kids with us. 

 The flying contraptions were all super creative, the teams flying them were usually dressed in costumes and did a 60 dance/performance before launching into the lake. Most of them just lawn darted into the water but a few of them got some nice air which earned quite the cheers from the crowd. It was a fun way to end Taber's super belated birthday date, and totally fit with our theme of flying that day :)