Urbs In Horto--My Road Scholar Trip to the Art Institute of Chicago

Early Morning View from the Art Institute Grand Staircase 

Road Scholar is a nonprofit educational travel company geared to travelers aged fifty-five and over. It offers thousands of tours in all fifty states and abroad. Founded in 1975, the organization is headquartered near Boston, connecting with other groups that run the tours on location. Road Scholar was originally known as Elderhostel, when my parents and maybe yours took these trips. But in 2010, Elderhostel rebranded as Road Scholar, perhaps distancing itself from an association  with "hostile elders"  Last week, at the ages of 60 and 61, respectively. my husband and I  became  Road Scholars for the very first time, complete with oversized badges and listening devices.

The trip that we chose was the five day Treasures of the Art Institute of Chicago which cost $1450 per person, not including airfare. What it did include were five nights at the historic Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago, (one block from the Institute), four dinners and five buffet breakfasts at the hotel's Lockwood Restaurant and four lunches at the Art Institute Cafe. We also got free, early admission into the Art Institute and private tours and gallery lectures representing a wide range of art styles and time periods.

The program also included a Chicago Architecture Center walking tour featuring late 19th century and early 20th century buildings.
Below is a photo I took of my favorite building, The Rookery, with an interior designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and an exterior designed by the firm of Burnham and Root

The Rookery

My Treasures of the Art Institute tour was originally was going to be a solo trip, but my husband George decided to join me at the last minute, figuring that if he lost interest in the art, the treasures of the city of Chicago were waiting just outside. As it turned out, we attended every  gallery lecture ranging from The Old Masters to Abstract Expressionism, to Rococo, to Impressionism to African and Native American art.  We also had free time to catch a jazz performance at the Jazz Showcase, visit a friend and her Mom in a spectacular Chicago high rise at Harbor Point and see a Second City comedy troupe.

The trip was a huge success, but we went into it with many concerns.  For example, would we be the youngest people on the trip by perhaps as much as twenty years and would the pace be too slow? Would our fellow Road Scholars really take a scholarly approach or would they focus on their own lives and ailments?

(Our intake questionnaire asked for a fairly complete medical history including medications and contact info for our primary care doctors).

Would the art experts truly be experts and if they were experts would they be condescending? In the Bay Area, we have had our share of condescending experts in ALL fields.

These were the lightweight, portable stools that we used.

As it turned out, none of these concerning things came to pass. In fact, the trip surpassed all expectations. But I was willing to take a chance and put these concerns aside when planning to take this trip on my own. For one thing, I have a strong interest in art history which also means an interest in world history and religious history and dare I say life itself. And I never really had a chance to learn about any of these subjects except in large college survey courses. Another factor was that I had briefly visited the Art Institute before  on a family trip to Chicago in 2018, and I knew what a stellar, well displayed collection it had. Despite its size, the Institute had a friendly vibe--which I guess I could say overall for the sections of Chicago that we visited.

I have a terrible sense of direction and need to be corralled should I start to daydream, and so the structure of the Road Scholar trip worked for me.  What's more, I can sit through the most boring of lectures by finding other ways to amuse myself (what is the instructor wearing--is that gold pendant made of real gold ? are those two fellow travelers who are  checking each other out going to hook up later?  Look at that photograph across the room of the topless Hell's Angel --I think those breasts are real) Also, since I am now an adjunct English professor at Menlo College, I like to analyze the teaching styles of others, even if they are really bad at it--especially if they are really bad at it! Fortunately, to a person, these were stellar lecturers--many on the Institute staff. Also, because this was an older crowd, the tours took comfort into consideration--there were really sturdy stools  available for us at the galleries . (See the photo above.)

The outdoor cafe --features ducks this year!

There were also bathroom breaks(no lecture was longer than an hour), an early lunch at 11:30, which I loved, and an early dinner at six, if you wanted to have the hotel meals.
Here, (at right) is a photo I took from an outdoor museum cafe table.

We were fortunate to have a group of ten--some Art Institute tours have as many as thirty people. And none of the folks on our tour had mobility issues, although folks in wheelchairs are welcome and accommodated if they bring along a traveler who can help them out, if necessary.

There were three couples and four single people on the trip. Most were retired. George and I  were among the younger people on the tour, but not by much. One woman nattered endlessly about personal matters including the state of her digestion at all hours, but she was an exception. There were no chronic complainers and all were attentive during lectures and participated in group discussion.
Overall this was a friendly, intelligent group and George and I plan to keep in touch with one of the other couples that we met on the trip--a retired biochemistry professor who divides her time between Phoenix and North Dakota, and her beau of three years, a retired accountant from Michigan. They met when each was traveling separately in Paris. They live separately, but travel together and their budding romance was wonderful to observe.

So with literally thousands of Road Scholar programs to choose from, how can you pick a winner?

Although we were a small group, we had headphones to block ambient noise

Dr. Lauren DeLand explains Kandinsky!

Of course, word of mouth helps a lot. But here are some other ideas:

Find out who's really in charge and how long they have been doing this: First and foremost, you need to remember that Road Scholar is a contractor and program quality really depends on who is running things at your location. The Art Institute of Chicago has an outreach program and we, as seniors, are one of their targeted audiences. The people who ran the weeklong program, taught the courses, escorted us around the museum, and chatted with us at lunch, were all Institute employees, trained volunteers or local professors.  And they worked well together as a team. Morale at the Art Institute appeared to be high at least in front of the canvases. What's more, the Institute has been running this program with Road Scholars for over five years and the Outreach Director has been with them for seventeen years. They have got this down!

Check out the quality of your accommodations: This is easy enough to do with TripAdvisor, Yelp and other evaluation websites. Also check out the hotel/motel website. You want to be able to relax at the end of a long day and if meals are onsite, you want to make sure they are quality meals. You also want to have a responsive staff if something goes wrong in your room.The Palmer House met all of our needs--it is a four star hotel and has a great central location.

If you think you may get bored or restless, or if you are traveling as a couple, where one person may have more interest in the subject area than another--see what other activities are available nearby.
In Los Angeles or Florence, Italy or New York City, your co-traveler should be fine. But make sure your partner won't be trapped if they lose interest in the lectures or featured sights.

Check out the activity level indicated on the tour and observe it carefully. This is not the time to test your physical limits--know what you can do before showing up. Otherwise you will inconvenience an entire group of people and could put yourself at risk.
Our Art Institute tour did not involve a lot of physical activity other than gallery walking, and we had portable lightweight stools for gallery lectures. We did do one walking tour with the Architecture Society which was rather ambitious on a muggy day with a fast walking, traffic dodging tour leader. Everyone did stretch their endurance on that walking tour--still we had no complainers.  However, everyone had the opportunity to leave the tour which centered on buildings near the hotel. The advantage of traveling with an older group, at least in this case, is that everyone is kinder about your frailties, whatever they may be. At this point, most of us have got a few.

Many of the travelers on the Art Institute tour had been on other art tours with Road Scholar and they recommended an art tour called Art Collectors and Their Collections which is held in Los Angeles/Pasadena and covers the Getty, Norton Simon and Huntington collections. Right now the dates do not work with my Menlo College teaching schedule, but I will be keeping watch for a summer tour.  If you go, let me know how it is!!!

This sculpture is called Gift Horse and it was designed to show the conflict between art and commerce.

A Poem for ESL Students ....And Everyone Else

Portia Nelson (102--2001) was a cabaret singer, a poet,  a songwriter, a painter and an actress on the long running afternoon television drama a.k.a. soap opera a.k.a telenovela All My Children.  When throat cancer threatened to stop her career late in life, she developed a new way of singing and speaking. She was talented, resourceful, tenacious and she explored and expressed many talents. Small wonder she wrote the poem below about choosing new life directions.

The poem has been a staple of self help movement books and meetings. But it was new to me. I heard it in synagogue Bible study as we read the book of Exodus. Our teacher Rabbi Janet Marder talked about how even though the Hebrews had fled their lives as slaves in Egypt heading for a new land, as soon as it got tough wandering in the desert, many wanted to turn back--the certainty  ofslavery being preferable to the unknown.

I would have shared this poem earlier in January as a New Year inspiration, but I wanted to test it out first as a teaching tool. It works. The language is simple enough to be used in ESL classes for reading, speaking and discussion. If your students speak English as a first language, you can pair it with the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken.

Whether you walk on urban sidewalks or roads that diverge in a yellow wood, I hope that you learn from the obstacles along the way!

Autobiography in Five Chapters

by Portia Nelson

Chapter One:

I walk down the street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I’m lost.
I’m helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in this same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I fall in.
It’s a habit.
But my eyes are open.
It is my fault and I get out immediately.

Chapter Four:

I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter Five:

I try walking down a different street.