West Edmonton Mall - Water Park

On Wednesday, July 6th, we awakened with great anticipation.  This was West Edmonton Mall day!!!  For those not familiar with this awesome place, I will fill in some details for you.

West Edmonton Mall (WEM) is the largest shopping mall in North America.--  Yes, it is larger than Mall of America. --  WEM is the fifth largest mall in the world. It covers a gross area of about 570,000 m² (well over 6 million sq ft). There are over 800 stores and services and parking for more than 20,000 vehicles. More than 23,000 people are employed at the property. The mall receives 28.2 million visitors per year; it also attracts between 60,000 and 150,000 shoppers daily, depending on the day and season. ~ Wikipedia ~

We had lunch in the food court with this friendly fellow; who seems to be there every time we are so we have made it a habit to always visit with him while we eat our lunch.










Sam, once again, is having her favorite Canadian food, poutin (poo-teen).  This delicious snack is made of French fries, melted mozzarella cheese and smothered with hot gravy!  Yuuummmmyyyy!  It's the perfect kind of high calorie snack to eat before we burn them all off in the water park.

These wonderful water walkways are also in the food court.  Children and adults alike (aka: Dave) love to jump up and stick their hands in the water flow to spray those around them ---so tread carefully!

On this particular day, we were there to visit the World Waterpark, which is the world's largest indoor water park of roughly 30 acres.  It has a maximum capacity of 40,000 guests, an average temperature for the water of 30-33 °C (86-89 °F), and is the world's largest indoor wave pool holding 12.3 million litres.  There are 24 different water slides.  Some can be seen in this picture and the others are innerwoven throughout the park.  One can also bungee jump above the deep end of this pool.  I'm not one to do that though since I get sick to my stomach just watching people take the plunge! :)
 

This is the children's area, Caribbean Cove, where some adults like to play as well. On the top, behind the large blue gorilla, is a 1,200 litre bucket that dumps water down the front of the structure every 2 minutes.  Our kids were dumped on quite a few times

Our favorite part of the water park is the wave pool.  There is nothing like jumping towards a 5 foot wave coming towards you and seeing how far you can ride it before you are run over by fellow passengers and tubes!  You never know where, or with whom, you will turn up after the wave is gone! :)

Here's a "live- action" video of the enormously fun chaos!