Our 30 hour Family Adventure at The West Edmonton Mall

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The skies were blue and the air was crisp. With the five of us packed in our truck, we left Calgary and drove into Edmonton 2 days after Christmas. You may be thinking, why were we in notoriously COLD Edmonton in December? Well, Pat and I had decided to take our kids to the West Edmonton Mall as their big Christmas gift!

About West Edmonton Mall

The West Edmonton Mall (WEM), once promoted as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” is a leading tourist attraction in central Alberta. The WEM covers 49 hectares and encloses 493 000 square metres of space – the equivalent of 104 football fields! For 24 years it was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest shopping centre.

The themed shopping areas of Europa Boulevard and Bourbon Street replicate streets from Europe and the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Areas for entertainment included the World Waterpark, the world’s largest indoor wave pool; Galaxyland Amusement Park, the world’s largest indoor amusement park at the time of completion, and the NHL-size Ice Palace skating rink, which was the second home to the EDMONTON OILERS hockey club; Professor WEM’s Adventure Golf Course, the world’s largest indoor miniature golf course; and Deep Sea Adventure, the world’s largest indoor lake housing live dolphins (until the last one was relocated in 2004),  and the only landlocked full-size replica of the historic ship, the Santa Maria.

The Fantasyland Hotel was added in 1986, with 354 rooms, including 120 themed fantasy rooms. (Mall information care of The Canadian Encyclopedia)

Back to the trip…

We drove around the huge parking lot a few times to find a parking spot close to the Fantasyland Hotel as that was where we were staying for our one night in Edmonton. After parking and plugging our truck in (it was -27 while we were there!) we loaded up and brought all our stuff in, in one load as we didn’t want to go back out in that freezing cold. It’s a good thing we have three strong kids to help us out!

Upon entering the hotel we felt transported to  a magical fantasy with twinkle lights everywhere. We checked in, stowed our stuff and headed out to explore the mall and the World Waterpark.

Our first stop in the mall was at Booster Juice to get a nice healthy, filling smoothie as we got there just at lunch time, we explored a bit of the mall and then we headed to the World Waterpark (which is located conveniently close to the hotel).

The World Waterpark

The World Waterpark in the West Edmonton Mall has 3 pools and 17 waterslides, a surf simulator and the worlds largest permanent indoor zipline.

Let me just say it was pretty surreal to be standing there in our bathing suits, enjoying waterslides and the wave pool with snow covering the glass ceiling of the waterpark and knowing we had just come in from the aforementioned -27 outside!

Needless to say, we had a blast!

None of our kids had ever been on waterslides before and only one had been in a wave pool (we come from a small town). It was the perfect family thing to do for the ages our kids are at (15,12 and 10). And although it was quite busy due to the fact that it was winter break and all the kids were off school, we didn’t have to wait very long at any of the line ups for the slides.

The wave pool, on the other hand, was very busy and a little disconcerting when one decided to venture into the middle of the pool. There were a couple scary moments when the kids got a little tangled in the middle of the crowd.

Although it wasn’t quite this bad…

We were in the World Waterpark for about 5 hours and in that time we tried almost every single waterslide and the wave pool. We also enjoyed some of the lovely waterpark amenities, for instance free Coca-Cola beverages, and some delicious fries and poutine for a snack at one of the snack shacks. There are also cabanas you can rent for your family as well as a bar/lounge area where they serve adult beverages.

Fantasyland Hotel Theme Room

When we were all sufficiently waterlogged and prune-like, we changed out of our suits and headed back to the hotel to properly check in, explore our western themed room and change for dinner.

We knew we were staying in a theme room, but were unprepared to discover that there were not only theme rooms, but each floor was a different theme and as soon as you exit the elevator, you are immersed in the theme. We walked out to our Western themed floor and room and were enchanted by the portraits of horses on every door and all the “log” walls.

Upon entering our room, we were completely thrilled to see how immersed in the theme our room was. I will write more about our room in another post but in three words, It Was Amazing!

The whole floor we were on looked like this down every hallway!

Bunkbeds with a county jail theme, log walls, horses and cowboys and horseshoes everywhere! The kids had a blast in their “jail beds”

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By the time we finished checking out our room, we were all very hungry. So, we headed back down the elevator and out to the mall to Bourbon street to get some dinner.

Although, there are a ton of choices of places to eat, we knew before going there where we were going to eat, Boston Pizza! We had recieved a very generous gift card from my mom (thanks Grandma!) to Boston Pizza and given the fact that our kids love eating there, it was the easiest choice. It was perfect for our family to hang out, relax and enjoy lots of delicious food after our long day of driving and then playing at the waterpark.

After dinner, we walked back to the hotel (after a quick detour to the liquor store located conveniently close to the hotel!) and just spent the rest of the evening relaxing, watching t.v, enjoying our in-room hot tub and just generally enjoying our cool western theme room. Cadence and Gabe got a kick out of watching t.v. while sitting in the hot tub!

In the morning, Gabe and I walked down to the lobby of the hotel and out to the mall (they are all connected so you don’t have to go outside at all!) to gather some breakfast and since there happened to be a Cinnzeo located right by the hotel, we ordered huge, delicious, gooey cinnamon buns for our breakfast. Yummmmmm. After a quick stop at Starbucks for some coffee for me and Pat, we brought our goodies up to our room to enjoy with the rest of the family before packing up and getting ready to check out.

Galaxyland

After checking out, we stowed our belongings in the truck, then headed back into the mall to check out Galaxyland.

Galaxyland is part of the West Edmonton Mall and it holds the title of the world’s largest indoor amusement park. It is also the home of the world’s largest indoor triple loop rollercoaster! And yes, we did go on that rollercoaster, all of us, and yes it was both terrifying and also super fun!

We spent several hours going on almost every single ride there and just had a blast! Since Galaxyland is located conveniently beside one of the food courts, we all chose our favorite things to eat for lunch and then enjoyed a few more rides before heading out to the mall to do a little bit of shopping before heading back to Calgary.

Some facts about our trip:

• We decided to go to West Edmonton mall during Christmas break because that is the only week of the year that Pat is guaranteed to get off from work due to the job he does.
• We were able to offset some of the costs of the trip as Christmas gifts from ourselves and from family (which I will breakdown in more detail below.
• We wanted to spend Christmas with my sister in law and her family (who live in Calgary) so it worked out perfect to do that. Then we headed up to Edmonton for a couple days (Edmonton is only a 3 hour drive from Calgary. Whereas if we were to drive straight from our home to Edmonton and back it would have been about 20 hours of driving!).

Before I do the budget breakdown I just wanted to mention that we are very lucky to have some very generous family who really helped a lot with keeping our costs very low and we are so very grateful to them for that.

Budget breakdown:

1. Gas – I’m not sure the exact numbers for gas, but I will say that we were given a $100 gift card for gas from one generous family member to offset the cost.
2. Hotel – This cost us nothing as it was another very generous gift from family (Thanks mom!). The stay at the hotel also included admission tickets to the World Waterpark, so we didn’t have to pay admission there (for the 5 of us it would have cost over $200 for the waterpark)
3. Food – As I mentioned above, we were given a gift card that covered the cost of our dinner, so we only had to pay for one breakfast and two lunches for the five of us.
4. Fun – As mentioned in the hotel part, our World Waterpark passes were part of the package with our hotel room.  For Galaxyland, I had ordered 4 passes through our Airmiles  (they come in groups of 2) so we only had to pay for 1 ticket ($45) instead of 5!
5. Souveniers – This was another area we saved as, since we were going there right after Christmas, several weeks prior I had sent an email to grandparents etc mentioning our planned trip and suggesting that gift cards etc would be a perfect Christmas gift for our kids to enjoy at the mall (it was also perfect because hello boxing week sales!)

Would you like to see a video of some of our holiday highlights? You can check that out here, although forgive me for some of the video quality, still trying to figure this tech stuff out.

The last two things I wanted to say before ending this story is that first off, we are so very grateful for the wonderful generosity of gifts given to us by a bunch of our family members.

Thank you so very much (you know who you are!) for making our first real, all about fun and family trip a huge success and a whole lot of fun!

Secondly I would like to mention that we weren’t paid or perked for this trip and all opinions are my/our own.

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