For Memorial day weekend I decided to take the weekend to make a quick trip up to Edmonton, Alberta to meet up with my sister at the West Edmonton Mall. I wrote my last post from the San Francisco airport just prior to taking off on my United flight up.

The flight up was just over 2 hours long and I arrived in Edmonton without incident. Picking up the rental was a breeze and then I pulled out the directions I had printed to get to the airport. No fancy phone with directions! How would I survive the weekend? I got to the hotel around midnight and met up with my sister Heather and her husband Randy. We stayed up past 2AM catching up.

Saturday morning it was off to the mall! I have to say that the rental car ended up working out very well since car troubles caused my sister and her husband to take their big truck down to the city rather than their car. It ended up being much easier to take my rental car everywhere.

The West Edmonton Mall is huge. Fortunately Heather and Randy had been there before so they had parking strategies and knew where the important things were. Our first stop was Tim Hortons for some coffee. Oh how I miss Tim Hortons coffee. I was also missing my phone at this point, the hotel had free wifi but the mall didn’t, and as we had plans to drive across down for dinner I was quite worried about driving around an unfamiliar city without navigable maps in my pocket. I snagged a Wind Mobile SIM there at the mall to use on my visit, within minutes I had 3G again – Maps! Tweets! Email! Yay!

Connected-to-the-world sanity restored, we headed to the pirate ship.

Apparently they do parties for kids and things on the giant pirate ship. That watery area is also home to the sea lions and a small underground aquarium so we picked up some tickets for the sea lion show at noon and entrance to the aquarium.

The sea lion show was great, 3 sea lions put on a show that lasted about a half hour, lots of audience participation and the best part? At the end everyone in the audience had an opportunity to get their picture taken with a sea lion! And not just any picture – a picture that gets your hair wet as the sea lion touches his nose to your head to “kiss” you.

Sea lion kiss was probably the highlight of my day (yeah, I look a little scared in the photo, but that’s because sea lions are giant!).

After the show we headed over to the Bourbon Street themed section of the mall where we grabbed some pizza for lunch.

Then it was down to the aquarium! Where there were penguins!

The rest of the afternoon was spent exploring the shops in the mall (oh yeah, it has those too) and then we played some mini golf.

That evening we headed over to meet up with my friend Alex. I’ve known Alex since 1998, we met on the irc.scifi.com chat network back when I first got online and have kept in touch throughout the years. This was the first time we’ve had the opportunity to meet in person. We met at his mother’s house where his sister prepared a delicious roast chicken dinner and wrapped up the meal with an amazing cheesecake that Alex made from scratch. We rounded off the evening by sitting on the back porch for a while watching the sun set until I realized it was almost 10PM. The sun not setting until after 10PM had me out of sorts all weekend! Crazy northern regions.

Sunday morning we had more Tim Hortons coffee which Randy actually walked from the hotel to get (kudos!). We then swung by the auto parts store to pick up some things they needed and then headed back to the mall for the day. First thing at the mall that day was glow in the dark minigolf!

In case it’s not obvious, I love minigolf and it had been far too long since I’d played. Lunch was at the food court where I went with a burger from Harvey’s “because it’s Canadian” and then we wandered toward Build-A-Bear. Now they have Build-A-Bear in the US too, so this shouldn’t have been anything exceptional, but:

• The only other time I’ve made something at Build-A-Bear was the last time I was in Canada, when I built a maple-leaf stamped bear
• 2. They had hockey outfits and an adorable WWF wolf that would look awesome in a hockey outfit

So I built a hockey wolf, because it’s Canadian.

At 3 we headed toward Galaxyland, the world’s second largest indoor amusement park, which is in the mall. The primary purpose of this visit was so I could check off “ridden on indoor roller coaster” from my life to do list. We checked out their 3D theater and then it was off to try the smaller roller coaster, the Galaxy Orbiter. Immediately after getting off that one it was on to the Mindbender, which wikipedia tells me is the ” the world’s largest indoor triple loop roller coaster”. Awesome. I almost threw up afterwards. I don’t think this is so much a comment on the coaster as much as it is on me – in 2009 when I went to Hershey Park for Halloween I got sick for the first time after coasters, last July when I rode on the coaster around New York New York in Las Vegas I thought my roller coaster days were over, and this Edmonton coaster pretty much confirmed it. The only ride I went on after that was the little train that took you around the whole indoor park.

Before leaving the mall for the day we swung by the theater upstairs to see the giant dragon which typically breathes fire every 20 minutes or so, but was undergoing maintenance. Which reminds me – a lot of the mall was undergoing maintenance. There were whole sections boarded off and torn up which my sister tells me were cool things like fountains and interesting things to look at in the sections of the mall which were more geared toward shopping, it’s ashame it was all torn up.

For dinner we had steak! At Outback, which is not Canadian.

On our way back from Outback we stopped at a beer store to pick up some goodies for the evening. Randy recommended the Innis and Gunn and I suggested my sister check out the Strongbow Cider when she described the trouble she was having finding good cider (same problem I have – too many sweet ciders in the US, not enough crisp). Neither of these beers is Canadian. It was a nice evening, but between the beer and allergies I was dead asleep by 11PM.

Monday morning we checked out of the hotel and had a bit of an adventure in the parking lot as the truck wouldn’t start and we needed to call CAA (think AAA) for a tow to get it looked at and eventually a completely dead battery replaced. While it was being repaired we took the rental car down to the Royal Alberta Museum. Unfortunately their Creatures of the Abyss exhibit hadn’t opened yet, but we had the rest of the museum to explore. It’s not a huge museum, but they sure packed it full of Alberta history, from wildlife to geological to human history. There were also a couple dinosaurs.

The last adventure of my trip was to head down to Old Strathcona, the historic district of Edmonton centered on Whyte Avenue. It was a cute little historical district with lots of shops. We met up with Alex again and had lunch, visited a couple of collectibles shops (Heather doesn’t use Linux, yet, but she’s a WoW fiend and is probably just as big of a geek as I am). We wrapped up with some ice cream at Marble Slab Creamery (very similar to Stone Cold), yum! Gummy bears in Mocha ice cream!

Around 3PM we all sadly said our goodbyes. But we were both eager to get back to our homes, Heather was overwhelmed by being in the city all weekend and I was suffering from Edmonton not being enough of a city for me. Gosh I’ve changed.

The rest of my trip home was uneventful, I returned the rental car and got through security with no problem. Caught my flight to Vancouver for my connection down to San Francisco on Air Canada. MJ picked me up in San Francisco.

Good trip! Good weekend! More trip photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157626871823992/