Day 4
On the Road to Nowhere
Finding a car:
This was to be the day that we got dumped off the train in Edmonton. This was sort of a pity, because even if I don't have much to say about it, I was really getting fond of the laid-back train travel routine, and getting off meant having to take a more active role in working on this vacation.
Anyway, I didn't sleep too well the night before, because I was so worried about oversleeping our stop (as if the porter was going to let us do that). We got up around 5:00 or 5:30 AM, and without much ado, got off the train at the scheduled 6:20 AM in Edmonton. Without much other ado, we reclaimed our luggage, and then sat around in the terminal a lot, wondering what to do next.
See, we had a hotel room reservation and everything, but what we didn't have was transportation, and there were no car rental agencies at the station. Robert went to the Information window to see if they could give him any help in that direction, and he found them in such a state of preparedness for this sort of query, that they had to look it up in the yellow pages for him. They found us the names of all the rental car agencies that had downtown offices sort of close to the station.
We decided on Budget for some silly reason, which I sort of regret, because we later got reminded that Budget is a part of the "Sears Network of ways to separate you from your money," and I just hate Sears in general. Speaking of generals, the only thing I hate more than Sears is General Electric, but they don't have rental car companies that I know of, so it's irrelevant here.
When Robert called the agency, they were able to reserve a car for us, but they weren't about to do anything else about it yet, since they weren't due to be open for another half hour. That meant we had to sit around on our luggage for a half hour more, plus the travel time for the guy to drive over from the rental car place to pick us up. Ok, so I like boredom.
Still, this was a problem, because it meant that they also weren't going to be open when the train was due to leave extremely early Sunday morning, meaning that we'd probably have to return the car a night before we left, and arrange other transportation to the station on Sunday morning.
When we finally got to the rental car counter, which by the way said "Sears" all over it (just to make me feel at home, I'm sure), Robert's next job was to talk me out of renting a portable cellular phone to go with the car. Reminding me that we were still on vacation, he managed to talk me out of it, but only just barely.
They wanted a bunch of money for the car. You always see those wonderfully cheap rental car rates on the backs of the airline magazines, yet I've never been to an actual rental car counter where they had rates that cheap for anything, even a Chevette. In this case, they wanted about 50 CanaBucks a day, and that only included 100 km per day in mileage (kilometerage?). I know it's easy to dismiss that by saying that CanaBucks are worth less than my home town variety, but even with that Meech Lake business going on, they weren't worth that much less. Between the expense of the rental car and the hotel room, I could see that we were going to be spending something in the vicinity of $100 per day just for lodging and wheels. Maybe more.
Worrying about money can sort of wreck a vacation. I was going to be doing a lot of vacation wrecking like this in the days to come.
Back to the car: It was cheasy inside (note the FDA approved spelling). The driver's side seat had a power adjustment, but whenever I raised the bottom of the seat, it'd raise the right side of it a couple of inches before it started to raise the left side. I guess this would have worked out ok if I had to talk to someone with my head stuck out the window a lot, but I didn't. The trip computer also had this maddening habit of feeping at us at all sorts of odd intervals.
As a matter of fact, we didn't even know the car had a trip computer at first, until later on when we were leaving the hotel, it feeped at us wildly at one intersection for no particularly discernible reason. I couldn't understand how the head end of the thing could fail like that, given that it had no moving parts (well, maybe it did by the time we got to it). The other reason why we didn't know there was a trip computer at first was that the display was so dim that we could hardly read it.
Anyway, we signed for the car, and noted that we were paying for the mileage for them coming to pick us up at the train station (sigh), and headed for the hotel, which was only a few blocks away, also in the downtown area. As it turns out, train stations are almost always downtown in Canada. Nice, if that's where you're also staying.
Our first showers:
Checking into the hotel was quite easy (I just sent Robert in and made him take care of it -- what could be easier?), and they gave us a parking permit for the lot next door.
Having thus secured a room for the week, we raced inside to take a shower and a nap. I think we both liked each other a lot better after having had our first chance to really wash up in about four days. I also liked the idea of catching up on a bit of sleep. We didn't know quite how good we had it, because all the other hotels we were to visit wouldn't let us check in so early in the morning as this one did.
Later on in the afternoon, we set out to get some traveler's checks issued in Canadian dollars. There was an American Express office just a couple of blocks from the hotel, which for some reason wouldn't accept Robert's gold card as payment for the checks. So, he converted a couple of $100 US checks, plus some pocket change, into $250 of Canadian traveler's checks, thus getting to pay the 1% traveler's check service charge on that $200 twice. I also got some checks, and they did take my gold card. Go figure.
Next stop was this place just around the corner from the hotel called "Hot Pastrami Too", where we obtained another pair of warm pastrami sandwiches. I also got an order of fries with (cornstarched) gravy dumped all over them.
With money in our pockets and food in our bellies, we set out for the main (only?) attraction in Edmonton, which is the West Edmonton Mall. If you've never heard of this place, the outline for it on the city map is about half as big as the area outlined as being the Edmonton downtown district. This is one big mutha mall, and is reputed to be the largest in the world. I can certainly believe it, too. It's got everything, even if it does all cost more there (even after converting to post-Meech US$) than anywhere in the US.
Our travel agent told us before we left that we should allow at least two days to do the mall justice, so we planned on seeing the first floor on the first day, and the second on the next day. That would only give us three more days in Edmonton to figure out what to do with.
The Big Mall:
You know, Canadians take their shopping malls very seriously. This one has two or three cinema complexes, a few (more than two, but I didn't count) food courts, a full set of sit-down restaurants, a hotel, an ice skating rink, a just-barely underwater submarine ride right next to a pool with four dolphins performing tricks, a big huge swimming hole with wave machines and three or four water slides, a miniature golf course, and a fully stocked amusement park with what has to be the most brutal roller coaster I've ever seen, and something that drops you about twenty stories (before making you pull a few million Gs at the bottom), all in the name of fun.
This roller coaster did things that went beyond the now old hat loop-the-loop, and got into things that I could only describe with dog-fighting terms. That dead man's spiral was the worse looking. There were platforms and walkways all around, and through the middle of the roller coaster so you could watch the riders choking on their own vomit, and I'll say that in the spiral, they looked properly hunkered down. I won't bother trying to describe the rest, but if you do ride this thing, do it on an empty stomach.
This was one brutal mall. Now, without leaving the impression that there was never-seen-before selection and variety, I should mention that some (or maybe even many) of the stores are repeated throughout the mall. For instance, there are two Radio Shack stores, and there are enough Cinnamon Bun shops to keep the astute shopper from starving to death while working their way from one end of the mall to the other.
Even considering the repetitions, it's safe to say that I've never been anywhere with so many stores and amusements, which only further reinforces my suspicion that Canadians really don't like to go outside if they have to.
Actually, there may be a reason for this: I checked the map, and Edmonton appears to be at roughly the same latitude as the place I used to live in Labrador (Goose Bay). There, we had two seasons per year: 10 months of winter, and two months of bugs. If it's anything like that in Edmonton, I can understand the Mall-Mania.
We got about halfway around the first floor before our feet gave out on us, so we decided to have lunch in the second of the two food courts we'd run across. Here's another indication of the ethnic diversity of Canada, or something at least. At the time I wrote this, we'd been to three food courts in two different malls in Edmonton, and I have to say that the mall food that we get in New England is, by comparison, cow patties. I'm pretty impressed by both the variety and the quality of Canadian mall food. Even the fake Chinese place I ate at on the second trip to the mall was superior to most of the sit-down Chinese places I've been to in New England. Not great food, understand, but tasty just the same, and of a quality that I just don't see around the malls in New England.
As seriously as the Canadians take their shopping malls, they also pay for it. Go into a store, pick a familiar item, convert from CanaBucks to the US variety, and even comparing that price to a US mall price, you might just find yourself a little overwhelmed or a but horrified at the prices they're asking there. Now I understand why there's so much talk of Canadians buying their electronics on visits to the US.
After our dinner at the food court, we tried to work our way around the mall a little more, but we just weren't about to convince our feet to go along on the trip. We dropped by the second of the two cinemas we found (on the first floor, that is), and saw a movie. This gave us almost enough rest for our poor, overworked little feeties (which were more accustomed to being idle in the dome car), and afterwards, we finally finished off the first floor.
Another thing we found a lot of in the first floor was video game arcades, all over the place. I went into one of the larger ones and was very impressed at the number of machines, and the overall good shape they seemed to be in. In fact, at first I came to the conclusion that this arcade must be a place where meticulously maintained antique video games are put on display for anyone with enough quarters to want a trip back memory lane. I thought that until I realized that while I could find any video game from my dim memories, I couldn't find any of the newer games that I like, video or pinball. Seems like Edmonton is in the wrong side of a video game time-warp, which is good or bad depending on your outlook.
Well, that just about did it for the day's trip to the mall. I picked up a couple of tacky postcards to send the folk back at work, and a couple of other trinkets of no intrinsic value.
Aside from the repeated stores, I was sort of struck at how few unoccupied store fronts there were in that huge place. Go into any mall in the US, and you'll probably find a good percentage of empty stores, waiting for some business to come rent it. They're empty, of course, because there's usually a glut of overpriced store space to be had in shopping malls all over town, an there quite simply isn't enough business in tow to support that much mall floor space. Edmonton's big mall seemed a strange exception to that rule.
Here, I wondered if there wasn't so much business in the mall that it'd just become a self sustaining community in and of itself. I mean, other than some harebrained theory like that, it just didn't seem to make much sense that such a large mall should have a lower than usual (by US standards) percentage of empty floor space. What few store fronts were empty had signs in front that said "We've moved to a larger location, elsewhere in this mall".
By this point, though, I was pretty whacked out. I'd just spent most of the day on my feet, and that's not the sort of thing I'd call "vacation activity." It was time for bed, or at least a really good lie down.
Back at the ranch:
We went back to the hotel, and decided to go sit in the bar and try to catch up on all those frozen sissy drinks that I'd missed out on for the last couple of days. Turns out that we caught them during their happy hour ("I don't think we're in New England anymore, Toto"), so my two Pina Coladas turned into four. I suppose you ask that if I was getting toofers, and if I only wanted two drinks, why didn't I stop after the first toofer? Well, it's the principle of the thing, that's all.
Other than that, it turned out to be a tremendously wrong time to be in Edmonton, in much the same way as it was the wrong time to be in Boston when we left: Hockey. Couldn't get away from it. Down in the bar, they had the game going on big screen TVs, little screen TVs, TVs ripped out of hotel rooms ... TVs. I couldn't even fart without some drunk at the bar shouting "She shoots! She scores!" and toasting Boston again, for playing such a lousy game. Later on, they were all out in the streets until all hours of the night, shouting and beating drums (no, I didn't go look to see what else they were beating, but I wouldn't have been surprised, whatever it was).
When I finally got to bed, I felt about as good as I did by the end of my first day, only this time, I felt too lousy to sleep. Alcohol does that to me, so I sort of laid in bed until some ungodly hour, trying to read some pulp SciFi until I finally dropped off to sleep.
On to Day 5 and Mall Fever
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