The Skydeck at The Willis Tower

Imagine this: A 1,353 foot(412 meters) building with 103 floors. Now picture yourself going to the 103 floor, stepping into a glass box that is attached to the side of the building, and staring down at the ground. This is the experience you get when going to the skydeck at The Willis Tower. I recently visited Chicago about a month ago and it is a beautiful city! I had heard about the skydeck before going and I wanted to visit it during our stay.

So first off, what is the skydeck and the Willis Tower. The Willis Tower is most commonly known for being the tallest building in Chicago. As I mentioned earlier it is a whopping 1,353 feet tall! Many people may still refer to The Willis Tower as "The Sears Tower". This is because the building used to be named the Sears tower for the longest time until a couple years ago. The building is used for various business offices and what not. It was originally created as almost like a headquarters for the company of Sears.

The skydeck is a new addition/attraction to the building and just opened a couple years ago. It is on the 103 floor of the building at the very top of the building. It is most commonly known for the glass boxes that come out from the side of the building in which people can step in and look down at the ground outside and at some of the city of Chicago. While the glass boxes are cool, there are many more cool things to the skydeck.

We arrived at The Willis Tower around lunchtime. The line for the skydeck was HUGE! We were very hesitant to go because the line wrapped around the corner of the building, but then a man told us that it was only about a 15 minute wait to get in the building. The man was right, we were in the building in no time!

Once we arrived in what seemed like a very small lobby we waited in line to get to the elevator. The line passed through a cool gift shop with nice t-shirts and other things relating to Chicago. The elevator, rather than take you straight up, takes you down a couple floors.

We stepped out of the elevator and went over to bag checks and then got our picture taken in front of a green screen. We bought our tickets and then entered another waiting room.

This one was the waiting room to enter the movie. We entered the small theatre and watched a short movie on the history of The Willis Tower. It was a pretty cool movie! It was not boring at all and had some pretty cool facts in it, such as why the building was designed the way it was and how it became The Willis Tower.

After the movie we entered yet another waiting room. This was the line to enter the elevator to the skydeck. I liked this waiting room a lot because it had many cool facts and pictures on the wall. There was pictures comparing the height of the Willis Tower to other tall skyscrapers around the world. It also had pictures of famous people such as Oprah and Barack Obama and it would tell you how many of them stacked would equal the height of the tower. Finally we arrived at the elevator to take us to the top floor, the skydeck.

Entering the elevator we had to squeeze to the back so that the most possible people could fit. It was very cramped in there! Then it happened, we started going up to the top! The elevator had a cool TV screen that counted the floors we were on. The numbers were going by so quickly because we were going so fast. In a matter of seconds my ears needed to pop. Then the elevator stopped.

We stepped out onto the top floor of the Willis tower, number 103. As we looked up we could see the city surrounding us. There were giant windows on all sides of the floor to show us the beautiful city of Chicago. We walked around the floor to see all of the angles of the view of the city.

Then we saw the glass boxes. There was so many people trying to get in and it looked like chaos. There were 4 boxes. Three of them were a free for all where anyone can go in at anytime and the 4th had a line if you wanted a picture in one. We went in a free for all one. We finally got up to the box after shoving past the huge clump of people. I stepped inside and it was awesome! I was looking straight down at the ground. I looked ahead and saw the busy life of the city. It was an awesome experience. We stepped out and looked around at some of the facts they had on the walls, bought t-shirts from the gift-shop, and then went down the down elevator to leave the skydeck.

What was so great about the skydeck was the fact that rather than just having a boring line the whole time they had fun things along the way to keep you occupied, and of course the glass boxes were also cool and so was the view from the top. Overall it was a great experience that I suggest everyone should do if they are ever in Chicago.