Don't want to be a doom & gloom guy, but fear the new venue for the Midwest may become a logistical nightmare. It's a little too early to tell, but figured it's better to warn you to plan ahead, car pool, and start early.
The traffic is something else & I we came in at 10:00 P.M. last night! The Chicago Pavilion IS SMACK DAB downtown - parking will be limited and expensive. My hotel charges $18/day.
From what we've seen so far, Chicago is broken and nobody knows how to fix it. Our hotel, Holiday Inn-Downtown, would be fine - if you don't need coffee, hot water, and/or in-room internet. We had to call down about the ISP, they brought up a Wi-Fi transceiver - it took two hours of phone tag with StayOnline (oxymoron) to get hardwired into their hosts file - service drops every few minutes - have to recycle transceiver to gt it to go - am typing as fast as I can
Will post more after , or during, field set-up.