Our Trip to Canada

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June 17^th, 2008: Day 12

When we awoke on the morning of June 17^th, we decided that Julie, Mandy and myself would go to the West Edmonton Mall again while Don & Ruth went searching for homes once more; so we got ourselves ready and piled in the car (careful to avoid any more meatloaf incidents) and headed out of Leduc.

When we arrived at the mall, we went in and turned the corner only to find… a giant indoor water park with a wave machine!

After viewing this spectacular attraction for a while, we moved downstairs to investigate the part of the mall we didn’t see the first time, and this time we didn’t have such an early closing time to worry about. I was very hungry so I found some food to eat in the nearby food court. I had a delicious Harvey’s Angus Burger (right); the girls didn’t feel like eating anything yet. All throughout my meal I heard clinking that sounded like ceramic tiles… I went to investigate and found that my hypothesis was correct.

It turns out they were remodeling a fountain of sorts that surrounded a 360° TV. We went into a nearby scary store called “Wow!” which had not only tourism things but also some pretty bad T-Shirts and stuff… we quickly left it and went further into the mall.

It turns out we were going through the right part of the mall at the right time, because there was a show on sea lions going on; I never realized how smart they were!

After the show, we went into another camera store and Julie found an awesome camera bag for a very reasonable price, so I became the owner of her old camera bag, a nice portable upgrade from my dad’s old bag (though I still use it). We continued down the hall and found a favorite of Liz’s, on the right.

From here Julie and Mandy went to the food court as I needed to find a restroom, but something caught my attention before I could do that; the Zamboni was out on the skating rink, and for some odd reason I find them quite fascinating. So I took a picture.

I made my way to the food court that Julie and Mandy were at and ordered my second meal of the day, a Quizno’s sub and sat down with them. Soon it was quite apparent that it was raining pretty hard outside as we heard hail pounding the overhead windows. Just a normal rainy day in Edmonton, right?

We continued down the hall even further, until we noticed something amiss… a bucket catching water from a leak; not something one would expect from a mall, but nonetheless we kept moving.

We made it to the “end” of the mall where HMV was, and I found another Halo relic; a Master Chief statue, among all the Xbox 360 games.

We got a call from Ruth while she was at the Rogers kiosk and she requested we meet her where she was so we started heading back towards the other end of the mall. However, something interesting caught our attention… it appeared the mall was flooding; water was pouring out of somewhere and saturating the first floor with at least an inch or two of water. You sure don’t experience this any ordinary day…

We were exhilerated; this is just the kind of weird events that we like so much. Apparently it rained so hard that a pipe that drains the roof couldn’t handle all the water and backed up; presumably water then started coming out of the other drains in the first floor of the mall. In order to contain the water, they started using anything they could to push the water into the skating rink or the water fountains. We left the mall that day with a great deal of satisfaction.

After the mall we braved the rush hour traffic to get back to Leduc, but the day wasn’t over yet. Before bed, Ruth gave Mandy some dental floss, but neglected to mention she had just used it… so poor Mandy ended up using used dental floss. After this episode we laid our heads down and earned some well-deserved rest.

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