A Day, A Week, Hemant, A Year

To celebrate my buddy Kipp’s 30th birthday, a group of his friends and family all met in Edmonton for the weekend. The agenda included water slide and wave pool fun at the West Edmonton Mall’s World Waterpark on Saturday afternoon. For the evening we had tickets for a show at a comedy club, The Comic Strip, in the mall.

I was supposed to travel to Edmonton Saturday morning with the infamous brothers, Travis and Todd. Since they both backed out at the last minute, I ended up making the trek by myself. Here is a picture of me driving to Edmonton (I was bored).

I was on the highway by 7:40 in the morning and was parked in the West Edmonton Mall parking lot at exactly 1:00 pm. Even though I made pretty decent time, water sliding was scheduled for 1:00 so I needed to get my tail in gear to hook up with the crew. After finding the waterpark, I bought my ticket and got changed (not before figuring out how to use high-tech locker system). The waterpark was insanely busy and I thought I would never find anyone. But I immediately ran into Kipp and his brother Ben and we made our way to one of the slides. The lineups were out of control and we probably waited for 15 or 20 minutes for the 30 second ride. Since we had a party room booked for 2:00 and we had about fifteen minutes to kill, we decided to get one more slide in. The lines were even longer and Kipp and I waited for at least thirty minutes. This slide took about ten seconds to go down - but it was a pretty fun ten seconds.

We were a little late for the party, but we were pretty sure they wouldn’t cut his cake before he got there. After eating some of the delicious cake and visiting with everyone, a few of us headed over to the “bar on the beach” for a couple cold ones.

The wave pool was looking pretty good so we decided to spend some time in there, rather than in lines for the waterslides. It was awesome as always, despite getting feet in the jaw and knees in the back of the head. After our eyes were filled with chlorine, and our legs had turned to Jello, we thought we had better get more watersliding in. The lines were no better than before and we ended up getting only one more slide in before having to leave to get ready for the evening’s events. Below is a picture of me in my bathing suit at the waterpark.

After checking into our hotel and getting ready we headed back to the mall where we planned on eating at a restaurant on “Bourbon Street” before heading to the comdey club. It turned out that all of the restaurants had around ninety minute wait times for a party of 12, and this just wouldn’t fit into our schedule. Curtis and I decided to just go grab something in one of the food courts and the other guys went to eat at the comedy club.

The comedy show was super-funny and we all had an awesome time. The MC was an Edmonton radio host and he was surprisingly good. There was also a couple other opening acts as well as a Bubbles (from Trailer Park Boys) look-alike who was great. The main act was John Wessling, a dude from Texas who was on Last Comic Standing. He had everyone laughing hard. Since we were out of the club at around 10:00 eight of us just headed back to the lounge at the restaurant and hung out before calling it a night.

On Sunday we all went to Denny’s for breakfast and then went our separate ways. Curtis rode back to Wilkie with me. As we passed Sherwood Park we decided to go visit my brother and his family since it was still early. We visited for a couple hours before heading out.

One thing I noticed while in Edmonton was that service there (and apparently all of Alberta) is terrible. People in restaurants, hotels, etc. were either rude, ignorant, or incompetent….or a combination of the three. I personally have never seen anything like it. Apparently the reason is because there is a real shortage of service workers in Alberta and places are under-staffed, or hiring anyone they can. I understand that, but come on - that doesn’t give you the right to do a half-assed job or to be rude.

Other than the service issues, the weekend was great. I got to see a lot of people that I havent’ seen in a while like Kipp’s brother and sister and their families, as well as some old friends from high school. I took a few pictures while at the waterpark and you can see them here.