West Edmonton Mall

I booked my trip to Edmonton on a whim, figuring I'd never get up here during the ultra-frozen winter to see a hockey game, and assuming I could get tickets to this weekend's folk music festival.

But the folk fest tickets were sold out long ago, and resellers didn't really work out for me. So now, here I am in Northern Alberta, trying to figure out what to do, and there isn't much. So I went to the mall.

West Edmonton Mall was once the largest in the world, and is known for having a waterpark, a hotel, an amusement park, and a submarine adventure, all within its walls. It's no longer the world's biggest mall, but is still in the top five. I spent an hour there, walked through about half of it, perused a few stores, bought a couple things, and wasn't even remotely impressed.

It's a mall. A mall with a lot of extra crap inside, because for 9 months of the year, it's too cold to go outdoors here, but it's still just a mall. It wasn't quite the capitalist mecca I was expecting, and I don't know why it attracts 22 million people a year. Nobody even got caught under a fake boulder. Shrug.

I now have all day tomorrow to fill, and thought I'd spend some of it visiting one or two of the quirky nearby towns that sprung up here during the province's frontier beginnings. When I looked for some directions, though, I noticed that what the guide book calls nearby, is actually 50-100 miles away, since Canada is just so damn big. I'm all for a road trip, but my rental Chevy has such an oversized interior and undersized windows that backing or changing lanes is undertaken largely on faith. It's not my favorite way to drive.

So it's a bit of a disappointing start, and I'm at a bit of a loss for what comes next, but I'll make it work. I still get to have a weekend with all things Canadian, and that always makes me happy.