Here we go:  part II of the Chicago chronicles.  Friday was an awesome start to the weekend, and thanks to the beautiful 80 degree weather and some amazing people, Saturday and Sunday were even better.

Since bootcamp (and work) has my body programmed to rise with the sun, Saturday morning kicked off pretty early with some coffee and a little romping around the city before settling on a breakfast spot: Eggsperience.

Honestly, this is one of my favorite breakfast spots, ever. There were a million options, tons of ways to substitute and create your own, and everything that came out looked delicious.

Since eggs are one of the easiest clean eating options for breakfast, that’s what I got – three eggs scrambled with broccoli, mushroom, and turkey sausage.

This breakfast was both the best and the worst idea we had all weekend.  It was great because I was starving and needed food (fuel) to get through the 10:45 Flywheel class – and it was bad for the same reason.

Last October Dar and I took our first ‘scouting’ trip up to Chicago and took two classes at Flywheel with Candy.  We didn’t know her at all, or what we were getting ourselves into, but she is Awesome, with a capital A.  Since our visit we’ve kept in contact with Candy and made sure (with her help) that we made it into her class.  That being said, her class was an hour of complete intensity and probably the highest energy class all around that I’ve ever been in — but half way through eating seemed like it might have been a mistake.

Regardless, we got a killer ride in before 12pm,  just in time to make it to lunch with a good friend, and rounded out the afternoon with a short(ish) shopping tour of the city.  That’s about the point where I lost Dar’s interest and ventured solo around the best Nordstrom Rack I’ve ever been to (after the standard trip into the lululemon on Rush Street of course).  I almost don’t want to share the primal experience that shoe and jeans shopping for me at a place like ‘the rack,’ but I have no problem saying this: it was something to behold.

By some miracle I managed to make it back to the hotel and get ready for another dinner out with the Charlottesville crew (me, Anita, Dar and her best boyfriend Uday…) at Cantina Loredo.

This was probably my favorite meal of the weekend- amazing drinks, awesome food, and a great atmosphere.  It’s the kind of high end mexican food that provides awesome food choices and modified options for clean eating.

That being said, we started out with some really great guacamole and chips, per the requirements of any good vacation, alongside the obligatory margaritas and mimosas.

Our entrees were equally as good – salads, tacos, and the like.

After dinner we headed out for a few more drinks at Fado, which I was psyched to see since it was a bar I really loved when I was living in Philly.

After Fado we made our last and final stop at RPM where we had the classic vacation late-night snacks.

Zucchini chips and a pepperoni pizzetta.  So, so good.

It was our last night in the city, and an awesome way to cap off the urban portion of the trip.

Sunday I went with Dar out to her cousin Jeff’s house for the last day of the trip, and had an awesome time hanging out in the pool, watching movies, and pretty much just relaxing with the whole fam damily.

It was an awesome trip, and a pretty tough place to leave, but it was time to get back to real life, and all the work that has to happen in these next few weeks to get Fight Gone MAD open in Charlottesville.