You call that a mall?

In an attempt to catch up on this blog, here's my post about Minneapolis and the Mall of America. I had been under the impression that the M of A had a roller coaster. I was misinformed. It has eight. It's also four stories high and in many cases doesn't have just one of any given store. There are two Victoria's Secrets, three Lids, and four Caribou Coffees, whatever those are.

Nickelodeon runs the theme park, so you can be sure there were giant posters of Spongebob Squarepants and the like. We rode the Fairly Odd Coaster which is like Psycho Mouse at Great America or Mulholland Madness at California Adventure, only more wacky and fun. We sat next to these two "cool" teenagers who kept asking why we were screaming; "are you really that scared? this is nothing."

Feeling sad that we had nothing proclaiming our trip to M of A, we stopped for a photo op by this corny poster. Figures, I go to Minneapolis and take pictures with California landscapes.

I'm trying to figure out if the water is going out into the horizon or if Alison's half-drowning and I'm long gone. Tough call.

For our last dinner together, we splurged in downtown Minneapolis. Afterward, I insisted on making our way to the second story of some building to walk across one of the sky bridges or whatever they're called. To connect a 7x7 block of downtown to make life bearable in the cold winter months strikes quite the brilliant chord in my mind. This one was Mary Poppins themed, note the umbrellas!


The next day I had to wake up early in order to drop off Alison at the airport in Minneapolis and drive 4 hours to my airport in Des Moines only to wait 3.5 hours for my completely out of the way flight to Texas which lasted 2.5 hours in addition to the first 1.5 hour flight, on which they fed me a dinner of beef jerky and trail mix, getting me home to Vacaville around midnight and that's not even taking into account the time change. Traveling cheap is so glamorous, isn't it?