Those who know me understand that I do a lot of picking at this small town for it's lack of, well, everything. Shopping, culture, food, you name it. I talk about how I would love to live somewhere that had, at the very least, a Macy's. Maybe an Olive Garden, too.
About an hour and a half/forty five minutes away we have Raleigh. We have been to several shows there (Jeff Dunham, Stomp, Shakespeare In The Park), and there is a Macaroni Grill that we enjoy. Even one of Eric's fast food favorites, Chipoltle. It is the perfect size city for my liking. Traffic isn't bad. There is also a GREAT spa called the Umstead (where I could EASILY spend the rest of my natural life). But as I said earlier, it is well over an hour away and not the kind of place you can go to during the week on a whim. Well, unless you are one of those people who can function regularly on 4 hours of sleep a night. Clearly I am not, nor have I ever been, one of those people.
This past week I was in Minnesota. I stayed in Saint Paul. I loved it there. One of the attractions in the Twin Cities area is the Mall of America in Minneapolis. I hopped the crosstown bus from downtown St Paul and went to the Mall of America with great excitement. Talk about everything I could ever want! A mall that had every store I could possibly want to shop in, restaurants that I love, and, get this...a ROLLER COASTER in the mall! I love roller coasters.
I walk into this mall and am quickly overwhelmed with everything that is happening around me. It was loud and hurried, and busy, and there wasn't just A roller coaster; there were 3. And a log flume. And a bunch of other stuff that made this place like an amusement park on crack.
I couldn't deal with it. 30 minutes. That was all I stayed for. I would have left sooner but I walked around for about 10 min, got lost immediately, and spent the next 20 minutes trying to find where the hell I came in. As I am beating feet for the next bus to downtown Saint Paul, I am asking myself over and over again, what the hell my problem is? I don't understand why this wasn't turning out to be a great thing. This was everything I asked for ten-fold!
That, I concluded, was the problem. I am all about small, controlled doses. This was complete retail/entertainment/roller coaster overload. *sigh*
So I am back in Goldsboro, NC. CLEARLY other extreme. But better for a person like me to be underwhelmed than overwhelmed. WAY better.
2 comments:
I had trouble with Mall of America, too. It's better to have a plan when you go in there.
-Chuck
Well you have basically been in a state of sensory deprevation for months, when you were describing what it was like when you walked in I could feel a knot in my stomach that I could not shake. Dont blame you for leaving!
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