Sunday, March 11, 2012

Minneapolis - Monday, March 5, 2012

So after a fairly dull close to our first day in Minneapolis, the husband and I got up bright and early to get our second day on the road! We didn't plan much for our second day - just a trip to a restaurant that was recommended to us, and the rest of the day at the Mall of America!


For breakfast, we stopped at Ike's Food & Cocktails, where I got a huge helping of French toast and the most delicious hash browns! (I literally ALWAYS order a side of hash browns with my breakfast. It's a necessity, I tell you!)

To be honest, I was super stuffed when we were done eating. The food was fantastic. The service? Not so great. Our bill was somewhere around 40.66, which was fine and dandy, so we gave the waiter 50, meaning we should have gotten 9.34 back. Instead, the waiter came back to our table and said he didn't have the right change and handed me some bills and a fifty-cent piece. I assumed he meant that he didn't have change and thus rounded up to 50, instead of the 34 cents. 
I was definitely wrong when I counted and saw that he had instead given 6.50, almost three dollars short. Josh was super angry because that meant the waiter thought it was okay to short us 2.84, instead of taking a 66 cent hit... Not. Okay.

Thankfully, Josh wasn't so angry that he let it ruin our day. (He's a bit of a dweller, especially when it comes to customer service...)

From Ike's, we went straight to the light rail platform to wait for our ride to The Mall of America!
Dun duh dah!
Since the ride was somewhere around 30-some minutes long, I snapped pictures along the way, mostly of the same thing: building's reflections in buildings, such as this:
I think it looks fascinating. No?

After the super long (see: we were falling asleep toward the end there!) ride, we got to the mall, and since we didn't want to blow our savings account on vacation (there are real life things to spend money on, like food and rent, haha), we decided not to shop, at all. The only money we spent was on food (lots and lots of food! and attractions, like the aquarium inside the mall).
So, rather than shop, we spent an hour or so walking around the mall on all the different floors, just window shopping. My favorite shop was definitely the Peeps store! It looked so cute on the outside!
I wanted to buy all the cute coffee mugs and shirts with peeps on them, but instead, we went over to the Lego store to play. Outside the store, they had little booths where you could play with some Legos.
I spent all of one minute building what I called "a house" and then we moved along to take pictures of all the Lego sculptures and "paintings". 
 
Can you imagine making those? They're all ENTIRELY Legos!

After oohing and aahing at them, we went to the aquarium. 
It was interesting, we got to see a tank full of rays, and a tank of sharks, some turtles, and a dark room full of jellyfish! (I'm super fond of jellyfish. They're so beautiful and I was super excited to get such clear pictures of these three!)

After the aquarium, we did another lap around the mall, looking for stuff we missed (and eating lunch). Along the way we found Bubba Gump Shrimp Co, with this bench outside!

Then, we decided to leave, after only four hours at the mall, because we had basically seen everything we wanted to see. Unfortunately, we only wasted four of the day's hours at the mall. A couple people told us to set a whole day aside for the mall, so we did, and after leaving and the thirty minute train ride back to the hotel, it was still only two o'clock in the afternoon. 

And so, the search for something to do began. Thankfully, Josh just recently got some kind of fancy Droid phone that surfs the web at super speeds (compared to my Blackberry) and I saw that tickets for the basketball game (Minnesota Timberwolves vs. LA Clippers) were only $30 each. The game was at 7pm, so we basically just took a nap for four hours before we had to leave. When I woke up from my nap, Josh was playing around on that snazzy phone of his and actually found tickets for the game for $20 that also included concession stand dinner. (And if you didn't already know, I LOVE concession stand dinner! Hot dogs and potato chips and soda? Heck yes, says my processed-foods addicted brain!)
When we got there, though, we figured out why those tickets were cheaper and included "dinner".
Our seats were so high up that we couldn't actually see anything. Great thing though: I'm not huge on sports so I was content just sitting there listening to noise while eating my concession stand food. And Josh wasn't too invested in the game due to our being from another state... So we left the game early (and now call ourselves "Half Timers" because we're those people who get up in the middle of a game, or circus performance, and don't come back.)

Instead of heading straight back to the hotel (see: on the street, where we were sure not to get lost), we decided to attempt to navigate our way back through the Skyway and were successful! Since it was cold outside, we were glad we didn't have to go out at. all!

Once we got back, we called down to the concierge to ask about pizza. I had been craving pizza for a week or so, but every time I wanted to order it, Josh would already have a plan for dinner (or not want pizza), so finally, he was down for some pizza too! The concierge suggested Pizza Luce, so we looked their menu up online, decided to get one of their specialty pizzas and called.

They delivered the most delicious baked potato pizza (crust, mashed potatoes, sour cream, brocolli, tomato, cheese, and bacon!) to our room in less than half an hour and we pigged out! 

Being totally stuffed and content with the day, we laid down to watch some more television (flipping through channels and watching whatever is so nice sometimes when you don't have cable at home). It was a great day in Minneapolis. It was pretty cold most the day, but I loved that we got to do fun stuff while still relaxing since we just did whatever. That's the best part of vacation.
At least that's what I thought, until Tuesday happened.

5 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Are you yum-ing due to the pizza or the french toast because I loved BOTH OF THEM. Ahhh. The food there was so delicioso.

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  2. So I just want you to know that I am thoroughly enjoying reading about this trip; I just wish you were posting a bit faster!

    Lurve.

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  3. sounds like a great time! minus the whole waiter bit. thats crazy!

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