Exploring Chicago - Chicago - page 115

Ravinia Festival Want to know where the natives get
away from it all? Come summertime, you'll find us chilling on the
lawn at Ravinia, the summer home of the highly regarded Chicago
Symphony Orchestra in suburban Highland Park. The season runs
from mid-June to Labor Day and includes far more than classical
concerts: You can also catch pop acts, dance performances, operatic
arias, and blues concerts. Tickets are available for the lawn and the
covered pavilion, where you get a reserved seat and a view of the
stage. The lawn is the real joy of Ravinia: sitting under the stars and
a canopy of leafy branches while listening to music and indulging in
an elaborate picnic (it's a local tradition to try to outdo everyone else
by bringing candelabras and fine china).
On concert nights, a special Ravinia Metra commuter train leaves
at 5:50pm from the North Western train station at Madison and
Canal streets (just west of the Loop). After the concert, trains wait
right outside the gates to take commuters back to the city. The
round-trip train fare is $5, a real bargain considering that traffic
around the park can be brutal.
Green Bay and Lake-Cook roads, Highland Park. & 847/266-5100 or 312/RAVINIA.
www.ravinia.org. Tickets: Pavilion $20-$75; lawn $10-$20. Most concerts are in the
evening.
THE WESTERN SUBURBS
Brookfield Zoo Brookfield is the Chicago area's largest
zoo. In contrast to Lincoln Park Zoo, Brookfield is spacious, spread-
ing out over 216 acres and housing thousands of animals—camels,
dolphins, giraffes, baboons, wolves, tigers, green sea turtles, Siberian
tigers, snow leopards, and more—in naturalistic environments that
put them side by side with other inhabitants of their regions. These
creative indoor and outdoor settings, filled with activities to keep
kids interested, are what set Brookfield apart.
Start out at Habitat Africa! , a multiple-ecosystem exhibit that
encompasses 30 acres—about the size of the entire Lincoln Park Zoo.
Then wander through some of the buildings that allow you to see ani-
mals close up; my personal favorites are Tropic World , where you
hang out at treetop level with monkeys, and Australia House, where
fruit bats flit around your head. The Living Coast explores the
west coast of Chile and Peru, and includes everything from a tank of
plate-size moon jellies to a rocky shore where Humboldt penguins
swim and nest as Inca terns and gray gulls fly freely overhead.
The dolphins at the Seven Seas Panorama put on an amazing
show that has been a Brookfield Zoo fixture for years. If you go on

Finds

Kids