Angela's Wedding Tracker: Bachelorette Weekend!

I am an incredibly lucky bride, because my bachelorette party wasn't just one night. Nope, I got three whole days in which to hang out with some of the most important women in my life. Three days of shopping, playing and eating. Totally awesome :-)

(BM Nicole, myself, MOH Brittany and BM Rachel, in front of Lush!)

At the end of April, three of my four bridesmaids and I met up in Chicago for a fantastic couple of days. Unfortunately, my other bridesmaid, Carling, couldn't join us :-( :-( :-(

Chicago was chosen for two reasons. First, a few years ago when Nicole got engaged, Brittany, myself and another friend took her to Chicago for a few days since the poor girl had never been there! Our hometown is a mere three hours away from Chicago by train, and with train tickets costing something like $8 at the time, there was no reason not to go! We hung out, went to various museums, and topped it off with seeing the original Chicago cast in Wicked, which had opened only a few weeks before we showed up.

(Ana Gasteyer as Elphaba)

So when my turn to have a bachelorette party rolled around, Chicago was a natural choice. To make it even more convenient this time around, Rachel was living in Chicago and had room for us to crash in the living room of her apartment!

I had a couple of things I wanted to do while we were there: try on bridesmaid dresses, and shop at Lush and Paper Source (which were even on the same street, just a few blocks apart. Super convenient!)

In addition, since we are all theatre geeks, I got to make suggestions for what show I wanted to see. We ended up seeing Sweeney Todd!

(Source)

It's no secret that I have a ridiculous crush on Johnny Depp, so I had seen the movie version and loooooooooooooved it, but definitely wanted to see the theatrical version as well, especially since this was the 2005 revival version, which had all of the actors playing the music on stage! Very cool.

We also got to see it at the very cool Cadillac Palace Theatre

(Picture by Brittany)

Best of all, we got to dress up all pretty for the show - it was the sort of theatre where if you showed up in jeans you would feel seriously underdressed.

There was also a sex toy party...of which there are no pictures :-( But I'm sure they would have been hilarious. (It was awesome to be the bride there. The rep had only brought one of a couple of the toys with her, so everyone would defer to me to see if I wanted it first!)

We also found out that, despite being a resident of Chicago for several years, Rachel had never been to the Field Museum!

(Look out! Sue's gonna getcha! Photo by Brittany)

Billy also requested that if there were any triceratops at the museum, that I get a picture for him.

Brittany, Nicole and I also checked out the aquarium while Rachel was doing some emergency repair work on her computer, which had been soaked in a rainstorm.

(Ahh! Big fish!)

And finally, the most important part of any party: Food. I was obsessed with getting a Chicago-style hot dog (best food in the world - if I could serve them at the wedding, I probably would!). Luckily, right outside of the aquarium was a hot dog cart.