World's Biggest Shopping Mall

Nearly at the end of our journey, we decided to have a look at the city of Edmonton, which is the capital of Alberta and one of the fastest growing cities of America (of course because of oil). Although it was pretty nice, there were no special sights.

So we traveled on to the most famous attraction the West Edmonton Mall. This is the largest shopping center in the world, containing a Rollercoaster and a big Waterpark. Of course we had lunch there and looked at the shops, but the purpose of our visit was to check out the great slides at the Waterpark. However, when we wanted to enter, the sign said that nearly all slides are closed and that was pretty annoying. We also met two Swiss people who decided not to enter the park, but as this was the main attraction we decided to go into it and we were really lucky: after 4 o’clock nearly all slides opened up and there was almost nobody standing in line. We even dared to ride the steepest slide (the red one), which you can see in our Edmonton Photo Album.

Of course this experience left its mark on our skin (Andi’s eye and my back). Starving, we had to go to the foot court after the Waterpark again - we've already adopted the American way of life :-)

In the morning we had found a cheap Motel near the airport, where we traveled then. We wouldn’t have guessed what we saw there: the Motel turned out to be a cowboy saloon with some rooms upstairs. Still we felt very safe, because there were three security doors, four cameras and we weren’t even able to open our own door. But finally we found out the code to open our door: just stick in the key only one third, turn it one quarter, stick it in completely and turn it one time around – isn’t that easy?

After that we started to carry our bags up to our rooms. This was actually a lot of work, because we had everything lying around in our car. The reason for taking a motel room was packing our stuff and not making our tent wet again. After clearing out our car, we hardly find a place in our room. It took us some hours in the night, packing a whole room of stuff into only four (!) suitcases - wow, what a compression factor!