{ Our Senior Year of High School }

Rewind ten years and meet me, a shy and awkward fourteen year old who had just switched barns to get competitive about horseback riding.  I was coming into a riding program that already had a core group of girls all within a few years of each other in age – they all had their own horses, they spent every weekend at horse shows and they all were best friends.  Not exactly the easiest environment for a newcomer to enter so our trainer Julie set one of the girls on a mission.

“Make that girl talk.  Break the ice and make her feel comfortable here”

And that’s exactly what Kim did.  Through the countless hours spent at the barn with our baby horses and sharing the horrors and highlights of high school, she became one of my closest friends.  College separated us with Kim going off to Cornell while I stuck to a smaller school, both of us showing competitively in the IHSA program, but of course in different zones with conflicting show schedules.  She’s traveled the world studying abroad in Peru and getting her Masters in London, but we’ve always managed to reconnect (most often over diner food) and never seem to miss a beat.

Shockingly Kim had never been to Chicago so we knew a visit was definitely in order.  Here’s how the weekend was spent:

{ Drinks at Benchmark in Old Town }

{ Architecture Tour }

{ A Stop at the Bean }

{ Fried Chicken at Herald’s Chicken Shack }

 { Dinner at Chicago Q }

{ Brunch at Orange }

And apparently Kim was missed quite a bit while she was in Chicago – she got engaged a day after she got home, big congrats to Kim & Will!