About a month ago, a couple of friends and I planned a road trip to Minneapolis to do some shopping and spend some time at Valleyfair. This was the first time any of us have crossed the border in a car without any adults, so it was kind of a big deal as we had to deal with the border officers, drive, and navigate in a foreign country all on our own.
Driving in the states is a lot different from driving in Canada. Well, at least the part of Canada that I'm from. First off, in the states, they drive in miles and have speed minimums. I repeat, speed MINIMUMS. In Canada, we use kilometres and as far as I know, we don't have speed minimums.
Americans also seem to drive differently. We typically signal, move in to the lane, and wave thanks to the people behind us. We quickly learned that when you're on the freeway or the interstate, you just need to go for it. If your car will fit in the gap, you just go. It also didn't help that we've never driven on freeways before as our city doesn't have them.
Anyway, like I said, we planned this trip so we could go on rides at Valleyfair, and more importantly, shop! Driving to Minneapolis from where I live takes about 8 hours. We left bright and early on Sunday, August 10th, to ensure we would arrive in Albertville at a decent time because of the early closure. Albertville is home to an outlet mall that is full of great shops and deals. It's around 40 minutes away from Minneapolis so if people plan to go to Mall of America, they usually stop by Albertville Premium Outlets as well.
After Albertville, we continued on our way to Minneapolis. We had troubles finding the hotel at first because the sign wasn't lit and the street it was on had two names (which was quite confusing), but we managed to find it after turning around a couple of times. If you're ever in the Bloomington Area I highly recommend you stay at the Super 8 on 2nd Ave off American Blvd/78th Street. It was close to anything you could possibly need! It's less than 10 minutes away from Mall of America, Holiday Gas Station was across the street, Walmart and Walgreens were both a block or two away and it was close to other strip malls that had stores like Ulta, Best Buy, Target, and more! Definitely can't beat the location! Plus, they have a free shuttle that will take you too and from the hotel, the airport, and Mall of America.
One of the drivers of the free shuttle really made our trip 1000x better. He was super nice, easy to talk to, and was a complete gentleman. Not gonna lie, we all kinda fell for him, just a little. I'm not going to name who fell the hardest, but she'll know who she is when she reads this. ;) When you want to use the shuttle, you have to choose when you want to leave and get picked up from one of the scheduled times. On our first night, we forgot that we booked 3 return seats for 7:10 instead of 9:30. He was kind enough to let us onto the shuttle anyway even though we technically didn't book any seats for that time. Luckily a couple of people didn't show up or else we probably would have had to cabbed it back to the hotel.
Unfortunately, I was really bad and didn't really take any pictures.. All we really did was shop and go on rides at Valleyfair. If you ever go to Valleyfair, I have three rides that I would recommend you go on. First would have to be Xtreme Swing, Steel Venom, and Thunder Canyon. My favourite would have to be Thunder Canyon. I would only go on it if you don't mind getting soaked. It's definitely worth being drenched the rest of the day.
This trip was primarily for shopping so I will be posting a ton of haul posts in the near future. As I mentioned before, I didn't really take pictures this trip because I was too lazy and didn't find really find much that was interesting enough to photograph, but here are a few that I managed to find.
One of my friends, Courtney, was kind enough to email a couple of pictures we took on her phone while we were away. I saw this massive Dora statue and convinced my friends to take a picture with it. There was a mother and her two children that were taking pictures in front of it and we think the mom thought we were just standing around and laughing at her kids because they were so cute. Little did she know that we were actually waiting to take a picture in front of it. But to be fair, her kids were honestly so cute! They just had the best poses!
Every time I've been to Mall of America, I've always missed out on checking out the Rainforest Cafe. I mean after watching Paul Blart Mall Cop over 5 times, you've got to check out this restaurant! Much to my surprise, the food was actually really good! We were kind of expecting the food to be mediocre because they focus so much on the theme but we were happily mistaken.
I ordered the Guacamole Burger. It was so good, super messy, but so good! The food was reasonably priced, especially since it's from an extremely themed establishment, and they all had super cute rainforest related names. The Rainforest Cafe exceeded my expectations and I would highly recommend you check it out if you ever get the chance. Also, I apologize for the terrible quality of the photo above... I took this picture off my snapchat camera so it's pretty grainy. I'm also in dire need of a new phone. It's just getting too old.
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| Taken from a bench on the 2nd floor |
I figured I should probably take at least one picture of the mall incase anyone hasn't been. I'm lucky that I've had the chance to come here around 4 times now, as I live relatively close to it considering I don't live in America. If you're a shopping fanatic, you should definitely check out Mall of America at least once in your lifetime. They have a ridiculous amount of stores that range from designer to more casual, affordable stores. They really try to cater to all shoppers as Mall of America is an important shopping destination for the states. The mall also has the best food court I've ever seen! They have a wide variety of places to grab a quick bite or have a full on meal. The restaurants look so cool. When you walk through the food section on the 3rd floor, you tend to forget you're in a mall. It somewhat resembles an airport because of the open concept that almost every single restaurant has. Definitely wouldn't see anything like that in my local mall!
It appears that we picked an interesting week to go on a road trip to Minneapolis. One of my friends mentioned how we had to make one of the days a mall day as a British band called, The Vamps, were performing in the mall. I had heard of them before but never really listened to their stuff until we were driving down to the states. We added a couple of their songs into our road trip playlist. I have to say, they do have some pretty catchy songs!
Overall, this trip was one I'll never forget. It was my first real trip where a couple of friends and I had to fend for ourselves in a different country. I also spent more than I was planning on but it was definitely worth it! I got a lot of beauty cult favourites that I can't wait to tell you guys about.
Sadly, this is probably the last exciting thing I'll be doing this summer as I go back to one school this coming Monday. I will be attending two post-secondary institutions and I'm kind of freaking out as this is my first time going to one of these schools, as I had already attended one of them last year. And I know like one person who goes to the new school I'm going to but they aren't apart of the program I'm in so I'll probably never see them. Looks like I'm going to have to make some new friends.. Should be interesting.
Did you do anything/are you planning to do anything as a last hoorah before school starts?
- Amelia
