More Mall Imagery

Before turning to posting about flowers and the soggy state of affairs on this dairy farm, please bear with one more round of the Mall of America!

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Bloomingdale's, Macy's, and Nordstrom's are a bit pricey for my shopping sensibilities, but I was mesmerized by the artsy displays and decor in those big stores which occupy three of the four corners of the Mall. (Sears anchors the remaining corner.......its more in my league.)

These were adorning the tops of shelves in Nordstrom's:

I think these next two display windows were at the 3rd level entrance to Nordstrom's:

Yes.......would that my destiny be in the deep end.......whyever not......! (I just realized: wherever, whatever, whoever, whenever are legitimate words......so why not whyever??)

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And, I'd be remiss not to mention all the restaurants in the Mall. Back in August of 2001, my mom, my daughter, and I were patrons here at the Rain Forest Cafe right before taking my daughter to the airport across I-494 to board her flight to Amsterdam to spend a semester studying in The Netherlands. (9/11 occcurred just a few weeks later.)

The atmosphere is rain forest throughout the restaurant.......jungle vines hung everywhere.......mist arose here and there. Also, occasionally, there was a rumbly vibration sound.......we thought maybe it was supposed to signify an elephant walking by, or a volcano erupting.......we just weren't sure, and we didn't think to ask.

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I'm guessing the climate inside Kokomo's is tropical Caribbean......and their neon sign was cool!

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Meet Mat the doormat!

I wish my name could be put to such clever use! Can yours??

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Going up the down escalator, or down the up escalator..........totally improper!!

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I wonder if this weirdo Holstein cow design is proof of our mandatory dairy promotion donation dollars at work!!?? Yeah, out of our monthly milk earnings, a percentage is scooped out for national and state dairy promotion organizations.

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George W.G. Ferris might do a double take to see his invention being put to use INDOORS!!!

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And finally, on our way home, we saw this old crane, snappily repainted in bright red, on display along highway 42 near Rosemount........"Vic's Crane & Heavy Haul", it says:

Mall of America

I'm thrilled to be able to guide you through a brief tour of that enormous retail cathedral known as:

Evidently, due to the sad fact that the upper Midwest boasts no ocean or mountains or world wonders, someone had the very bright idea to erect a gargantuan mall full of stores to serve as a mecca for shoppers. And who doesn't like to shop......right??!!

This trip was planned by my art teacher daughter as a way to celebrate the end of the school year. When she phoned last weekend to ask her younger sister to go along, my first response was, "What! With these high fuel prices, you're going to drive way up to the Twin Cities just to go shopping??? When you have plenty of stores right there near you in Des Moines??". She sighed and simply answered, "Yes". Somehow, right then, the rusty gears started turning squeakily in my brain and I managed to ask, "Can I go along, too!!??"

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Mall of America is located in the northeast corner of Bloomington, Minnesota-----a large suburb on the south side of Minneapolis------and across I-494 from the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport. From home, we motored north on 63, then caught 52 at Rochester and angled northwest toward "The Cities". At Rosemount, we turned west on 42 (a route we used many times in the past when the kids were little, on our way to the Valleyfair Amusement Park) and we intended to catch 77 north to the mall, but missed it somehow, and ended up on I-35W (leads to the infamous collapsed bridge) and I-494, eastbound to the Mall. A roundabout way is was, but it worked.

Surrounding the Mall are parking ramps, which are convenient, but you must be able to remember the location of your parking spot. We were in P3-Hawaii-West (info I scribbled onto a notepad) and we entered the 2nd floor level of the Mall between Eddie Bauer and Napa Valley Grille. I concentrated to burn these names into my brain so I'd have a reference point to use before plunging into the Mall's interior jungle.

My daughters and I had decided we'd split up and go our separate ways, so everyone would be happy. With cell phones, its no problem keeping in contact with each other.

Mall of America is on three main levels, a huge square surrounding an amusement park in the interior, which was where I headed first.......not to ride the rides, of course, but to take some pictures!!

As I roamed around amongst the boisterous groups of schoolkids on end-of-year class trips, and young parents pushing strollers, I suddenly saw this on the floor:

By golly, I've been to the big Mall several times, but had never wasted much time in the amusement park area, so I'd never before seen the plaque embedded in floor, denoting this significant spot! Yes, the brain gears were slowly moving......now, I vaguely remembered.......the Mall of America had been built on the site of the old Minnesota Twins baseball stadium!! Oh, my.......I realized with awe that Harmon Killebrew had stood right here in batting stance many times, and I gazed off into the distance, hearing the crack of a bat meeting a ball, with a home run hit soaring high beyond centerfield.......going, going.......gone.......into.........Hooters!!!

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Following my dreamy reverie, I wandered further amid the colorful rides.........why, look, those trees look almost real!! (I don't think they were, but I could be wrong.)

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Don't worry about doing stairs, here.......the Mall boasts escalator after escalator after escalator!! This set-up looked pretty cool all dressed up in shiny chrome! I'm guessing the distance around each Mall walkway is 3/4-mile or so, and there are three levels, and I went around each one a couple times.......oh-h, my feet hurt, from walking on all that concrete all day.

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My goal was to traverse each walkway on every level, and gaze at the colorful contents of the shop windows. Al's Toy Store had the "Cow Parade" collection on display........I have a hodge-podge cow collection at home, mostly gifts from relatives and friends over the years. I own two "Cow Parade" cows, #7703 - Tropicow! and #9131 - Daisy's Dream, only because my sister was kind enough to give them to me for birthday gifts. It looks like I'd go broke trying to acquire the rest of the collection!

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Whee-hee! Here's the newest ride, currently under construction........"Barnyard Party Animals".........wow, a farm theme........who thinks this stuff up!!?

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Now Showing......Old Navy!! Its an overgrown version, sprawled out on two levels, with its very own set of escalators in the middle of the store.

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What the name of this store is is a mystery to me........sorry........I really liked the pretty design, that's all.

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I became totally immersed in browsing, not at all aware of my location, meaning the strategically-placed mall directories were very helpful! My daughters and I would meet every two hours or so, eating lunch in the Food Court, and later sipping Caribou coffee while we rested our weary feet (well......MY nearly fifty-year-old feet got tired, anyway, even if my daughters' didn't!).

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An excursion to the Mall of America wouldn't be complete without a visit to "Legoland". My sons used to love this place!! Have you ever laid your eyes on dinosaurs made of Legos before?! Well, now you have!! Exciting, huh!!?

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Have I mentioned how tired the old feet got?? The cushy slippers in this "Happy Feet" display looked mighty tempting!!

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There were several stores of Minnesota-related merchandise.......this one, plus "Minnesota Bound", "Love From Minnesota", and several shops selling only Mall of America tee-shirts and miscellaneous tourist souvenirs.

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Occasionally, my browsing morphed into buying things........a couple pairs of shoes at DSW, and some shirts and clip earrings at Nordstrom Rack, a store containing all CLEARANCE items.......my kind of place!! The four corners of the Mall are anchored by Nordstrom's, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and good old Sears. In between are over 500 other stores and restaurants!!

Well, let's see........we arrived at the Mall around 11:30 a.m., and shopped until 8:00 in the evening! This actually is the first time I've ever done this trip in one day, as in past years we would stay overnight after enduring a day at Valleyfair, and then hitting the Science Museum of St. Paul, or the Minnesota Zoo at Apple Valley, before stopping at the Mall for a couple hours. Ah, yes, those were the good old days of strollers, diaper bags, etc.! I would take our four kids, and pick up a farmwife friend in southern Minnesota who had five, and off we'd go to the Cities.....two mothers with nine kids in tow!! It usually worked out surprisingly well. But.......I'm digressing......or digesting, or depressing, or something......

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This time around, a much older mother with her two grown daughters exited the big Mall and headed south on 77, which travels through the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, so named because of the Minnesota River which meanders through it. This photo, which was snapped hurriedly when I suddenly noticed the lovely scene, is probably as we crossed the bridge over Long Meadow Lake. I wish I'd gotten more of the railroad bridge shadow in the picture.

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Then it was a three-and-a-half hour drive to home again, with a stop in Rochester for a sandwich and ice cream, and to stretch......goodness, I could hardly move by then. My older daughter, bless her, felt like driving the whole way home, leaving me to doze and nod. I was awake enough to notice, though, that she was constantly changing the stations on the radio........just like her dad, who has the annoying habit of constantly changing the TV channels! We arrived home, safe and sound, around midnight.

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Our shopping junket to the Mall of America was great fun!! If you ever find yourself in the Twin Cities area and have a hankering to get away from nature and indulge in materialism, then do visit the gigantic Mall! You can zone out and explore another world for awhile!

B the Peace U Wish 2 C

Interesting little experiences came my way the day before yesterday. I had to take a long drive in pea-soup fog, on two-lane U.S. 63 in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota. For over sixty miles my Envoy rolled along in the fog at about 50 mph, hemmed in by two pickup trucks, ahead of and behind me. The two glowing red taillights ahead of me became beacons of constancy, security, and comfort in the midst of the murky cloud of fog. Maybe I became almost hypnotized by them.

When that pickup ahead of me suddenly put its blinker on and turned onto another road, I felt momentarily disoriented and cut off from my secure moorings. I was uncomfortable not having a leader ahead of me. Soon, for some reason, I suddenly felt like I had missed my turn toward Stewartville, MN. I signaled, slowed down and pulled off at the next intersection, thinking it was where I needed to turn, but it wasn't. I happened to glance in my rearview mirror, and saw that the pickup following me had pulled over, also! As if we were somehow connected! I pulled back onto the highway, and the pickup did the same!

Maybe that driver behind me felt the same way I had felt about the vehicle which I had followed for so many miles. Like it was my friend, someone to depend on to lead the way through the fog. Thus, when I veered off the path momentarily, he instinctively did the same. It was an interesting little moment of perception.

In Stewartville, the city of many, many white-globed streetlights, an electronic sign proclaimed this message to passersby: "Be the Peace You Wish to See". Yes, truly, that is as much as any one of us can accomplish in this life. Start with your own self, and the place that self occupies in the world.......pray for grace to be a peaceful bit of space, wherever you happen to be, whatever situation you find yourself in. Don't fret about the chaos and confusion......(or fog!) around you...... just "B the peace U Wish 2 C". Be the Peace. And then maybe you can be a faithful beacon of God's comfort and constancy to those who happen to be in your vicinity.

As Christmas rapidly approaches.......Be the Peace!

Buying An SUV

Everything seems out of kilter this morning......due to daylight savings time ending and my routines being thrown off over the weekend. On Saturday morning, Husband shocked the heck out of me by announcing he wanted to drive to Winona, Minnesota, to look at a vehicle. For the past several weeks, we've been searching online for a midsize SUV to replace our beat-up '90 Dodge Ram van. We browsed on AutoTrader.com and CarSoup.com. When Husband started typing in searches of over 100 miles away, I laughed and said, "There's no way you will drive that far to look at a vehicle!" He proved me wrong, bless his heart!

We hurried to get barn chores all done, and then headed for Winona. The day's weather was sunny, making the two-hour drive a pleasant one. We stopped for lunch at Subway in Spring Valley, MN, and arrived in Winona by 2 p.m. Quickly, we took a test-drive in the SUV, crossing the Mississippi and going into Wisconsin a few miles. We had test-driven a few SUV's in our local area, so we had an idea of what we were looking for----leather seats for sure and an exterior color that will hide the dust from our gravel road. Plus low miles and a good price, of course! This one seemed to have everything we wanted, so we took the plunge and purchased it.

After an hour or so of paperwork with the business manager, we were on our way home by 4:30......with lucky me driving the SUV! A great pleasure! Husband followed in the pickup. We decided to take a different way home, heading straight south on two-lane roads toward Mabel, MN. The wooded, winding roads led us through the little burgs of Hart, Choice, Rushford, Bratsberg, and Prosper, MN. Interesting names! At Decorah, Iowa, I turn off to get groceries at Walmart, while Husband continued homeward to see how our son was doing with the milking chores.

In Walmart, I suddenly felt completely exhausted, and in slow-motion mode. Everyone else seemed that way, too! Maybe it had something to do with all the fluorescent lighting in the enormous store, I don't know. It felt like I was in a trance. The Christmas music playing overhead seemed bizarre. The check-out clerk moved very slowly and deliberately. I decided that maybe my problem was that I hadn't eaten for several hours, so I ordered a Big Mac-to-go at the McDonald's that was inside the Walmart, on my way out. I had never seen a McDonald's inside a Walmart before!

To test the SUV's CD player, I had bought the new Eagles' CD, "Long Road Out Of Eden", that was in a big display there at Walmart. Joe Walsh sings of solitude in track 5 of disc 2, in "Last Good Time in Town"......that describes how I feel most of the time, too! Staying home is great!

While driving up our farm drive, I pressed the CD eject button. Whichever Minnesota radio station that had beened tuned in came crackling through and the first words I heard were, "Get your copy of the Eagles' CD, "Long Road Out of Eden" today......exclusively at Walmart!" I laughed and thought, "Funny thing.....I just did!" You've got to love those cool coincidences!!