Under a Giant Toadstool

Monday, Day 6

Our last day in Minneapolis found me eating a sandwich in the shade of a giant mushroom.
Next to a fog machine.
With fish swimming in the background.

This all took place, if you happened to be wondering, at the Rainforest Café in the Mall of America. Having heard of the café through friends, we walked in through the gift shop (yes, it has one), ducked past an animatronic boa constrictor, walked under a tunnel-type doorway that was actually an aquarium and finally sat down beside a steaming water feature.

 

Looking around, you see several other aquariums and artificial trees rising to meet a vine-obscured ceiling, giant statue parrots hung throughout it. Over here a motorized butterfly flaps its larger-than-life wings, and over there a troupe of animatronic gorillas flap their mechanical arms. Eerie. Suddenly white lights start flashing, and the sound of canned thunder drowns out the din of the busy dining room. Yeah, it was an experience!

(That morbidly fascinating picture to the left is the result of the four of us crowding into the same photo booth at the mall. I just want to say: my head isn't really that big.)

But that's not all. After we finished eating, the parents among us thought it would be funny to send us youngsters on the highest roller coaster in the mall. It's a vertical incline roller coaster, meaning it goes straight up before peaking and plummeting straight down.

It was actually pretty fun.

Baseball Culture

Sunday, Day 5 (Already?!)

We decided to take on a major league event today, along with a crowd numbering 34,780.
To be exact.

 

Welcome to Target Field, home stadium of the Minnesota Twins. (Get it--twins? Read yesterday's post otherwise.) The first thing you notice upon trying to enter the stadium is the sheer size of crowd you must merge into, and sometimes swim upstream against, to get deeper inside. I felt like a salmon.

Going deeper into the jungle of concrete, food stands and bobbing baseball caps, the next thing you encounter is the smells. The olfactory cacophony of a million frying oils is as loud and alive as the din of the crowd all around you. Finally, as you round a last bend, you see the whole field open up before you, framed by thousands of seats and lights on every side.

--Better stand up now, the National Anthem is starting...

The game itself was just about everything a tourist could hope for: two homeruns culminating in a win for the home team. (I especially liked that a Canadian hit the first homerun, not that I'm biased or anything.) The excitement of the crowd is contagious, a cheer erupting with every crack of the bat and swelling to a roar with every step run to the next base. I'm not even a sports fan myself, but the fun of being part of such a big event--a cultural event, I might add--made sitting through the game quite worthwhile.

Tom Sawyer for a Day

Saturday, Day 4

 

We landed last night here last night in Minneapolis, where we've parked to enjoy the twin cities with friends for a few days. "Twin Cities," I only now figured out, refers to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The two are apparently in a state of perpetual friendly sibling rivalry, much like Calgary and Edmonton. I still haven`t determined where the one city ends and the other begins, but I`ll have until Monday to get it straightened out...

This was our "Great Outdoors Day", including a tour of the Mississippi via riverboat:


The Mississippi River as seen from between the railings on the bow of our river boat. Ahead you can see where the Minnesota River (the left branch) joins the Mississippi (right).

Showy flowers seem to bloom
everywhere in the park

And an excursion around Como Park,
an admission-by-donation zoo and conservatory.

A rainforest conservatory in Como Park. That fur-ball in the top right?
It`s a sloth.

Minneapolis--and St. Paul--are both beautiful cities full of park space, wild-growing sunflowers, and enormous, bushy trees. Driving here through North Dakota, we had fun watching the little prairie trees near Saskatchewan change into the massive maples and oaks here in Minnesota. 

One such lovely tree. The river has exposed the giant tangles of roots
under most trees along the banks of the Mississippi.

Stars Stripes and Albino Buffalo

Welcome to North Dakota
 

Prairie scenery just north of Minot

Friday, Day 3

1:18 PM, Jamestown ND

I can’t remember the last time I stood under a sixty-ton buffalo. Probably because I haven’t before, until we stopped here in Jamestown today. Before us, stationed above a valley of rolling ridges, a 46 foot long concrete buffalo—declared by a nearby sign to be the world’s largest—stood keeping watch over the adjacent tourist historical village. A small herd of much shorter, much livelier buffalo (including one bright white albino one) grazed in the valley below, their furry tales swatting flies in near unison.

I Spy: albino American bison

A sign by the field in which the above herd grazed.

Hungry after all the wildlife viewing, we pulled into a local location of a pizza chain we discovered in Minot last night. This time, however, we managed to snag their lunch very similar to the one Pizza Hut hosts. I just want to say that almost everything there today contained bacon. Even the vegetables. They were really good—as was the unbelievably flavourful southern fried chicken! Which brings us to our…

List of the Day:

One of the funnest things about being in the States, besides eating chicken and trying new resteraunts, is noticing how many differences begin to pop up immediately after crossing the border.  Subtle things have changed, sometimes where you least expected changes to occur. Consider…

-Hotel breakfasts:  ours starred biscuits and gravy--a staple combo here that doesn’t occur in Canada-- and involved blue Fruitloops. (Canadian fruitloops skip that colour, going straight from green to purple.)

-Chocolate bars: the colours in the lettering of the Kit Kat logo, my brother pointed out, are reversed. Also, chocolate bars grow in checkout boxes here that we’ve never heard of in Canada! It makes Walmart trips into a sort of safari. Like bird watching, only better.

-Iced Tea: Canadian Brisk-lovers beware: you may discover too late that otherwise normal-looking fountain iced tea is not necessarily sweetened here, as it always is in Canada. If there are two iced tea spouts in a fountain, be sure to read the fine print on the label to determine which one has to sweet stuff.

-Measurements: our brains must now think in terms of miles, Fahrenheit and pounds. It definitely adds drama to gerocery store lunches when you can`t order the usual 50 grams of honey ham…when grams no longer exist.

-Billboards: unlike our small, rounded ones, all of the billboards I've ever seen here are pointy-edged. Many of them are twice as long as the typical ones lining Canadian metropolitan streets.

-McDonald's: the golden arches lack the central maple leaf.  

 

  
 
 

The Last Great Adventure of the Summer

Road Trip!

Trip Details:

Who: Four people and a minivan

What: Road Trip! The kind where you hop on the highway and follow the horizon as far as it will take you.

Where: Ultimately Southern Ontario, via Minneapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati…

When: Summer, 2013

Day 2: Saskatchewan to North Dakota 

(First full day on the road)

10:44 AM I’m here in the backseat of the van, between Saskatoon and Regina, watching the passing prairie landscape. By now we’re all quite familiar with the ever changing (yet never changing) combinations of bright canola fields, blue flax fields and green hay fields peppered with hay bales as far as the eye can see. I’ll say one thing for Saskatchewan: there’s a lot of horizon! And also a lot of Subways.

This morning marked the first time I’ve ever driven in Saskatchewan. We’re taking turns behind the wheel, and mine took us from the small town of Leask (near where we stayed with friends last night) to Saskatoon. Is it ever fun to drive in a new city!

4:15 PM Last call for Timbits! We’re about an hour away from the US border now, so we stopped in Weyburn, SK to stock up while we can. By tonight we will have arrived in the tree-seasoned hills of Minot, ND, far away from any Tim's--but with lots of exciting new places to try!

LIST OF THE DAY:

Certain city and town names in Saskatchewan have a definite “natural” theme running! Here are the ones we've come across so far...

Saskatoon

Moose Jaw

Drinkwater

Milestone

Yellowgrass

Gulping a Tree

Adventures of the Early Spring

This April landed me in a couple of novel scenarios, such as drinking water directly out of a tree. Where? At a maple farm in Southern Ontario, right during the two-or-so week window of time when the sap runs.  A network of blue tubes runs between trees, collecting the sap and bringing it downhill to be processed. Oddly, the raw sap contains a sandy substance that must be filtered out before the sap is evaporated into syrup. Ever eaten maple sand? I don’t recommend it. It has a gritty taste that is either so bitter it’s sweet or so sweet it’s bitter—I couldn’t quite tell which, but it haunts me to this day!

If tasting tree-sand wasn’t unique enough, we also had the chance to drink the raw sap. Our host dipped a cup into an old-fashioned tin bucket hanging from a nearby tree and handed it to Yours Truly with a sweet smile. While I'm glad to say I downed it, I can't describe how weird it felt to drink straight from a tree--just a normal, wood-and-bark tree--while LOOKING at the tree. The sap looked and felt like water, but carried a ubiquitous "sweet" tinge to the taste.

San Diego: A Million More Adventures



 

Parrots, sea lions, tide pools, palm trees, taxis that don't come, an originally-booked plane that doesn't leave with you on it...the last few days of this trip were certainly exciting ones!

 

 

 

 

Here's some footage of a whale watching trip we took, to get started...