The Windy City Saga Tour Report!

From April 21-24, 2022, I had the absolute pleasure of leading a group of twenty+ readers through Chicago to see the sites from all three novels in The Windy City Saga! This covered sites seen in Veiled in Smoke (Great Fire of 1871), Shadows of the White City (World's Fair of 1893), and Drawn by the Current (Eastland Disaster of 1915). Thank you to Bethany House Publishers, Revell Books, Credo Communications, Kregel Publications, the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, and our other sponsors and donors as listed on the Sponsors Page.

During our tour, I had help from fabulous guides who specialized in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, the Loop and Lincoln Park, and the Chicago Cultural Center. We also had the distinct privilege of being joined for dinner at the Walnut Room in Macy's by Ted and Barb Wachholz of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society. After working with the EDHS for more than a year while researching and writing Drawn by the Current, this was definitely a highlight for me personally, and I could tell it was a highlight for the group, as well.

For more information about some of the highlights, you can view a PDF of the program here. The program's itinerary does not include the pre-weekend activities we had on Thursday, which was a walking tour of the Prairie Avenue Historic District, including guided tours of Second Presbyterian Church and the Glessner House.

Here are just a few of the hundreds of snapshots taken over the course of the weekend. From left to right, top to bottom: The lobby of the historic Palmer House, which was our hotel; outside the Chicago History Museum; dinner in the Walnut Room at Macy's (formerly Marshall Field's); outside a house I used as inspiration for Hiram Sloane's house in Veiled in Smoke; the Chicago River between LaSalle and Clark Street bridges (the site of the Eastland Disaster); the Tiffany mosaic ceiling inside Macy's.

Our driving/walking tour guide, Kevin Doerksen of Wild Onion Walks, did a fantastic job of showing us several important sites on our way to the Chicago History Museum. Among other things, we saw the courthouse; the Conway Building where Olive works in Drawn by the Current (now the Burnham Center); and some rare survivors of the Great Fire, such as St. James Cathedral, the Water Tower, etc. Pictured below, we're outside the Chicago History Museum, and he's telling us about this molten blob that was a hardware store that had melted down during the 1871 fire.

One of the things I loved most about the weekend was how the members of the group used their free time to see whatever interested them most. Pictured below, left to right, top to bottom: I'm with Susie Finkbeiner at the Chicago Cultural Center (this was actually a group tour); Rana Boykin and Michael Morris at Millenium Park; Jessica Nikkel, Beth Hagberg, and Stacy Regennitter at Navy Pier; Bettina and Rob Dowell on a boat cruise where the river meets Lake Michigan.

Other activities tour members enjoyed on their own included attending the symphony, visiting Jane Addams' Hull House Museum, touring the Driehaus Museum, and shopping on the Magnificent Mile. For more pictures from the 2022 Windy City Saga Tour, see my album on my Author Facebook page here.

Our weekend's grand finale was A Novel-Tea Evening with the Authors, but that event has its own separate blog post here! For more information about our weekend, see the subsite here.

Have you been to any of these sites? Which one(s) would you like to see?