I shall spare Amtrak’s blushes and just say that we got into Chicago (another Union Station) in the morning and were immediately whisked off on a guided tour of the city. Numerous songs have been written about this city and with good reason. Maybe there is something in the air, but everybody in our group immediately felt the attractive ‘vibes’ of the city. We stopped off on the shore at Northerly Island Park to look back at the famous skyline (picture – me roasting in the heatwave in the foreground). It truly is a beautiful city. Our guide took us out to Wrigley Field (home of the Chicago Cubs). I was fascinated by the ‘Wrigley Rooftops’ phenomenon (the owners of houses overlooking the Field have built seating onto their rooftops!). Inevitably, the guide took us to the site of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre (now an anonymous parking lot) but the one that interested me was the Biograph Theater in North Lincoln Avenue. The theater is on the National Register of Historic Places and, as a recognised Chicago Landmark, has a plaque on its wall. But the theatre is also renowned as the place where FBI agents shot John Dillinger in July 1934. A scourge for the authorities, Dillinger’s bank robbing prowess turned him into a sort of folk hero (in the 1930s, banks had a nasty habit of failing and wiping out hard working people’s savings in one fell swoop). Indeed, one of my main gripes about the film starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger is that the audience isn’t given a sufficient sense of why he was popular. After his death, women dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood…