We started at the hotel in the morning, which was a nice hotel with good toilet flushing power compared to the other hotels. We then headed straight out to the Mall of America, the biggest mall in the country. I had my doubts, but upon seeing it in person, I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest one. It’s pretty big.
We parked in the West Garage on the Texas level. Apparently, all the floors of the garage are named after states. And went inside. They had lots and lots of stores. One of the first things we saw was the Nickelodeon-themed theme park that’s smack in the middle of the mall. We checked out all the roller coasters there and decided to get some ride points so that we could ride a couple of rides. There was one that was themed after Spongebob named “Rock Bottom Plunge” with a drop of some kind, and we rode that. It took us up to the ceiling, turned 180 degrees, and dropped us. There were a couple loops and some wild coils toward the end. It was a bit of a rough ride, but fun still, just like some of the rides in Cedar Point. That ride was pretty cool to find inside of a mall.
They had some rides themed after a bunch of shows that we liked from Nickelodeon, like The Last Airbender. There was Ninja Turtles stuff, too, which was okay. I kind of liked the look of the little ride they had where you could ride a sky bison, which was kind of neat. We got on another coaster called the Pepsi Orange Streak. That one was a little slower-paced. All these rides are kind of meant for kids, smaller kids, which is kind of cool. But they were still pretty fun to be on. Oddly, the cars of the Orange Streak were orange, but the track was green. It rode around the entirety of the amusement park, so you got to see all the rides that were there.
Then we decided to have some lunch, so we went to find lunch in the mall somewhere. On the third floor of the mall’s south side, there’s a whole hallway full of nothing but restaurants. And it’s a little different from home in that it’s not like a mall food court. I mean, they do have food court restaurants there, like Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A. But they also had regular restaurants and stuff along there. We settled in a middle-of-the-road place that served noodles that were pretty tasty. I had some tortellini. Riley had some spaghetti of some kind. Riley says tortellini is not a noodle, so is that even a noodle store? I don’t know, but it was pretty good anyway.
From that third floor, you could look down into the center of the amusement park. You could also see the Lego store models that they had built entirely out of Legos, which were very large. Riley also learned that there was an aquarium inside the mall, literally inside the mall, which is pretty weird. There was a 300-foot-long tunnel that went under the water somewhere inside the mall as part of this aquarium. So we went looking for that, found it, and did a little tour through the aquarium inside the mall.
We can say we visited Minnesota’s largest aquarium, which is undoubtedly some kind of achievement. After that, we wanted to spend a bit more of the points we got for the amusement park and ride another ride before we left, so we got on some kind of Ninja Turtle-themed flying contraption. I don’t remember the Ninja Turtles flying, so that was kind of weird, but it was fun. I nearly got the thing to flip but couldn’t bring myself to have it flip entirely over.
After that, we left the mall and dealt with some Minneapolis traffic on the way out to see the world’s largest ball of twine made by a single person. The world’s largest ball of twine turns out to be pretty big. It’s a pretty big ball. There’s a glass pagoda around it. The town that it’s located in, Darwin, Minnesota, was having their one main road ripped up. So, although it was not hard to get there, we were perplexed about how we were supposed to get through the construction to get to the ball of twine. Staring at the torn-up road, I said that we didn’t come this whole way to see twine, only to be prevented from doing so by some road repair! So we plowed the rental jeep through some of the torn-up road and got to that ball of twine.
When we got there, the Twine Ball Museum was closed, which wasn’t a surprise because it looked like the whole town was kind of shut down due to the road repair. We nonetheless got some good pictures and signed the guest book, which was fun to review. We then went across the street to check out the Twine Ball Inn, which is under renovation. They’re going to turn it into an Airbnb at some point.
After the twine ball, our next stop was in a city called Granite Falls, which has a dam. Before we were driving through this area, there’d been heavy rains and flooding everywhere, so all the water was really high. In Granite Falls, there’s a park that’s got a 9-hole disc golf course. Riley and I played all 9 holes of the course after we figured out how to get started on it; it’s a pretty nice course overall. Riley creamed me; beat me by 7 strokes. The only thing I’d say bad about it is that because it’s so close to the water, it had tons and tons of mosquito bugs, which was somewhat unpleasant. Overall, it’s a nice little park with a little playground for kids. Of course, they also have disc golf, and with the water running there, it’s picturesque. There were also pelicans there for some reason. I don’t know why the pelicans decided to land there in the water, but there was a whole bunch of pelicans just floating around out there – pretty weird.
After we left disc golf, we picked up some gas and some Twizzlers and headed out to our last stop of the day, the Palisades State Park in South Dakota. We got our South Dakota state line crossing sign photo, which was excellent. When we pulled into Palisades State Park, we lost cell service entirely. Still, the park itself was beautiful, with lots of open space and clear vision out into infinity in most places. We were driving over some of the hills in the park when we came to a bridge that went over a river. The bridge crossed Split Rock Creek, which split the rocks in Palisades Park.
When we got our key to our cabin and drove through the park to find it, we passed a bunch of gaps in the trees where you could see the river and the rocks. As Riley points out, the very tall rocks were made of pink quartz, which was really unusual to see. The rapids that went through there made it a beautiful place. If it was close, I could see us going to a place like that on a regular basis because it’s just such a lovely park.
We climbed around on the rocks a little bit, went down to the water, and saw where the high water line had recently hit from all the flooding. It really got wet around here. There were a bunch of trails near the water that had been completely flooded in some of the recent rains, which is kind of crazy. On the whole, it was a charming park, and it would have been nice to stay a little longer, but we had to get on the road.
The cabin was fantastic. It was made by some inmates at the local prison, but it was pretty high-quality. It had an air conditioner, a heater, a couple of windows, and Adirondack chairs. We made some dehydrated food directly in the bags - sorry, Mr. Mengel - and had dinner right there on the cabin’s deck. We got a decent night’s sleep and then headed back out on the road.
Today’s trip is to the Badlands, crossing the entirety of South Dakota and seeing a handful of little sights on the way to ultimately land in one of our main attractions. Looking forward to that.