Krysta Figueroa: Mall of America

So I'm quite overdue for my post about my trip to the Mall of America with Chris... oops.
Well I found out that I can write blogs at work, so I may start taking advantage of that on our slow days!

Anyway...here's my recap on the trip!

So after I got off work on Monday at 10:15pm and came home, changed, grabbed my clothes and we were off!
We were stocked up on laffy taffy, cookie teddy grahams, beef jerky, Monster energy drinks and a few other miscellaneous snacks.

Chris started the trip since he was used to working nights, and I tried to get some sleep so that I could take over driving once Chris got tired. At about 6am, Chris was starting to get tired, so we stopped off at a gas station, refueled and swapped seats. I took drove until about 8 or 9am when we stopped off for real food at a little Subway, then we were off again and finally got to the Mall at about 10:30am.

I didn't think the mall looked that big from the outside, but once we got inside my mind changed. It was huge! The middle of the mall was a Nickelodeon themed amusement park (mostly for kids) and there were 3 full stories of shops, 2 major food courts (with some miscellaneous food shops and full sized restaurants scattered around the mall) and a 4th story with a full sized movie theater, a Hooters, Dicks Last Resort a comedy club and a few other major restaurants.

In order to take in the full mall, we decided we'd make two laps around every level. First focusing on the shops on the right, then on the left

Of all the stores, our two favorites were called "Mind Marbles" and "The Afternoon".
Mind Marbles is a store that has games, toys, puzzles, books, and all sorts of things to stimulate different parts of your brain. The store was broken up in to sections like "logic", "memory" etc. and all the things in that section, stimulated that part of your brain.
I bought a book from mind Marbles where you answer a question every day for a year, then the next year, you answer the same question and you get to see how you have changed and how your answers have changed over the years. You do this for 5 years. So far I've filled it out every night before bed!
We also got one of those books for Chris's mom, and an art puzzle for his youngest sister. It's not like a regular puzzle though where the pieces fit in to one another...in fact they're just squares and you have to overlap them to make the picture. I didn't know how much she's like it, but she seemed to love it!

Out other favorite store (The Afternoon) was a store that just had a bunch of cool little trinkets and knick knacks. There were odd books, weird games, strange kitchen tools and appliances, unique clocks... I could have spent all day in there just looking at all the neat stuff!
If I had an endless budget, I would have bought one of everything...but I settled on a measuring shot glass instead.

When the mall was closing, Chris and I weren't very tired since we had slept for a while at our hotel (which was like a mile and a half away from the mall) so we went to a nearby Casino for some dinner and free play. It wasn't the neatest casino I've been to, but the food was pretty good and it was still fun.

On out last day, we went to the Rainforest Cafe for a big, filling lunch before we made our way home. Our waiter told us that we were eating at the original Rainforest Cafe, which was neat. The whole restaurant was really cool though. There were plants and fish and waterfalls everywhere, and the ceiling was painted to look like the starry night sky.
I'd love to eat at another Rainforest Cafe!

After eating, we walked the aquarium under the mall. It was a full sized aquarium with turtles and fish and sharks and octopus! All it was missing was Shamu! It is incredible that all of that is tucked underneath a mall!!

With one thing knocked off my bucket list, we had to scratch one more thing off, so we made a detour to Pizza Doctors on the way home since it was just over the Minnesota/Wisconsin border.
I'd seen this place on some food show and it looked so amazing!
Basically, anything you want to put on a pizza, they'll put on a pizza. There were taco pizzas, seafood pizzas, pasta pizzas, dessert pizzas...anything you could want!
My favorites were the macaroni and cheese pizza and the Mr. Potato head pizzas. The Mr. Potato Head was basically a baked potato pizza. I think there was a tasty cheesecake one too, but I ate more dessert pizzas than regular ones.

There's no way I can go in to detail about every little thing we saw, so hopefully some of these pictures can explain for me!