I love visiting other coffee shops. It is generally both a great experience in both learning and indulging the senses, and I've always especially appreciated my visits to Intelli. I remember my first visit just two years ago when I was at coffee fest Chicago for the weekend. I was new to the upper echelons of coffee when I walked in to Intelli Millenium Park, and I was greeted by both a friend barista by the name of Goodrich (whom I met up with in competitions just a year later) and my first glance at Clover 1s. It was a magical experience for me as I was exposed to the capabilities of a coffee shop to create an almost surreal atmosphere and to do so while serving great coffee. For this reason, I gladly revisited that place within the next year, which is quite a drive for me from Eastern Indiana.

Fast forward to this weekend. Much time had passed since my last visit to Intelli. I had planned in vain multiple coffee-only trips with numerous friends who share my love for coffee, but this weekend my wife and I had decided to celebrate our third anniversary with a trip into the windy city; BINGO. We parked down on Ohio and made our way to Michigan Ave. to appease my wife's need for Crate and Barrel and H&M, all the while my hunger for coffee rising like the sweltering humidity in the midday sun. I knew and could feel how close we actually were to CoE coffee and a nice double black cat in a winged demi. As we made our way back to the car it was all I could think of. We proceeded to quickly click the power on with our Garmin Nuvi only to proceed on I what I would characterize as misguided tour of frustration through the crowded and nervous streets of downtown Chicago until, after 30 minutes of mounting tension, my wife exclaimed, "This is stupid. I'm not doing this anymore today." My heart sunk. We muscled our way out of traffic to our good friend Rachel's place to hang out a bit before retiring to our hotel.

As we were sitting in Rachel's den talking about the irony of being only three minutes away from coffee bliss I was further overwhelmed by the fact that I was also only two houses down from the Zell residence, where Rachel serves as nanny to Scarlett, Doug and Emily's daughter. Rachel just had a cup and sat around with Doug and Kyle Glanville the other day. Just not fair. Rachel mentioned that the Broadway store was further outside the downtown area toward Lincoln Park, which meant less traffic and easier parking; or so we thought. We held out until the end of our next day, but after hours in Ikea and REI (we needed raincoats for our trip to Panama in October) I had little patience for anything but a perfect visit to Intelligentsia. Proceeding to Lincoln Park, we were surrounded by slow moving traffic and found our drive to take about an hour longer than it ever should from I90 to Broadway. This would have been forgettable and reasonable if we would have been able to find parking ANYWHERE in a half mile radius. I'm sure you're sitting there and laughing by now at both my misfortune and my ignorance of the madness of the city, but I'm from Smalltown USA and don't deal with this kind of traffic. We debated even having my wife circle the block for only a few minutes while I snagged a double or a capp to go (erggghhh), but to no avail. We left in total disappointment and the only thing that we tasted today was bitter defeat. I will go to sleep dreaming of one day taking a train in from the edge of town and walking a half mile, much like a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in search of the ever elusive Intelligentsia.