Mall of America

Our plans for the next day were to visit Mall of America, so we got up early to beat the rush of people.

For a huge mall, I must say that the parking system is very well organized. Each area of the parking garage is organized by the name of a state. We parked in Hawaii. The mall is pretty huge, although it wasn't that much more impressive than other malls. It was very neat looking. I kind of reminded me of those narrow alleyways in New York where you might find laundry hanging from apartment to apartment. The stores were kind of like that with their "balconies" being the walkway for shoppers. There are 4 major department stores in Mall of America: Bloomingdales, Macy's, Sears and Nordstrom. We didn't end up going to all of them, just Macy's. We went to all of the little stores, however. We didn't go on the roller coasters, though. I really wanted to. :-(

We stopped for lunch at one of the many sit-down restaurants in the mall -- Another BBQ place called Famous Dave's. From the looks of it, it's a pretty big chain down there. It was pretty good, although not as good as Dickeys, and about twice the price. Which is still pretty darn cheap.

We were about to leave empty handed (me? leave a mall empty handed? I think not) and I popped into a store and found a lovely crocheted sweater for $15. It looks nice on me, I think. So I bought that. We also stopped at Macy's because they were having a huge kitchen sale. We bought a cast iron pan and a non-stick skillet. This is a fancy-pants skillet. It was originally $100, but they had put the wrong tag on it, so we got it for $40. Woot woot!

We stopped at Chili's for supper on the way home. It was close to our hotel. It was pretty good. Andre said his burger was excellent and I had the fajitas.

We decided that we were going to do the 17 hour drive and go home the next day. We hadn't yet booked a hotel on the way home and we were starting to feel homesick. We went to bed really early in preparation for our long drive.