Saturday, July 04, 2009

Just Seeing the Sites

July 1st started in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

We made it back to the fitness room today. It had pretty nice equipment, but boy was it humid in there! This was another location where you have to walk through the hot and humid pool area to get to the itty bitty fitness room in the corner. They had very nice equipment, stair climber, treadmill, and a bike, but it was sooo hot. You know it is bad when you go into the swimming pool area and the temperature drops.

First traveling stop of the day was to see Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox.
They were in a park just a few blocks from the hotel just waiting for us to visit at his logging camp.
There was a plaque there that told the story of how Paul was vandalized when someone knocked him over and then restored in 2002. The people of the Chippewa Valley put their resources together and got to work with the restoration, which took about a month. In 2003 they got together again and also refurbished Babe.
After that adventure we headed toward Minnesota and the world’s largest stucco snowman!
This guy is standing in North St Paul, overlooking highway 36. He is 54 feet tall and was built in 1974. The street signs in town have a little snowman on them.

I thought it was cute. On down the road we found another Menards.
This was a case of we had seen them for miles and miles and really didn’t know what they had for sale. So we swung by and found out it was a combination of things – electrical stuff, construction stuff, garden stuff – sort of like your typical big box hardware store we figured so we went on. Update We have since actually shopped in a Menards – they have all the hardware store stuff and a bunch of mega-store stuff – some types of clothes, food (but not bread and milk), pet supplies – a bunch of odd things, but a very convenient store.
Another thing we had seen lots of along the road were these water park hotels.
It looks like you can walk right from your hotel room to the slide. Cool, but not on our agenda. The next stop was The Mall of America!
We enjoyed the Lego construction display where FabHub narrowly missed being attacked by a Dinosaur.
The Biker was really detailed too.


The mall has an Aqua Park in the basement. We found lots of awesome fishy type things.

Some with pointy noses,






Some with jagged pointy noses,

Some Sharks,

Some very odd fish,


Lots of coral,



More Coral,


and some Sea Horses

We also did a bunch of shopping. I had a $100 gift card to the Finish Line store and since most stores have very little in my size I ended up shopping in the LiveSTRONG department. I got a bunch of stuff for $9. I love MyPoints.
Then we found a store with a bunch of random collectors stuff in it. Military patches, signs, license plates, and state magnets. I found 16 that I needed in that store! Now I have 20 of them. YAY ME!
We also found an As Seen On TV store, they had a gadget that my Pecan smashing mother needed. Course she probably will never do that again now, but hey it is good for walnuts too.
And we found some stuff for Sister's baby.

That was the end of this day. We are staying here by the mall so that we can check out some other things around the area, so see you back here tomorrow.

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