A Close Call

We left the Elk Island National park Saturday around noon and headed toward Edmonton. After hunting down the Visitor Centre we tracked down a campground which ended up being half-way between Edmonton and the park! The park sucked as well, with crappy camp sites, no water, only 2 bathrooms, and pay showers it was and probably will be the most pathetic camp site we use this whole trip.
That evening we headed downtown to check out the Street Performers festival. We were pretty impressed by everyone we saw there, especially the robotic guy. He even did sound effects to his movements.
The camp stay was uneventful and we left the grounds in the morning and headed for the West Edmonton Mall. I thought it was pretty good but it didn't totally meet Anne's expectations. We were waiting until 3pm to go in the waterpark to save a fair bit of money but Anne was still too excited to check out any of the cool stuff in the Mall, so we mostly just wandered around. At 3 we finally went in and had a great time for about an hour and a half. While Anne was going down slides and I was wandering around with Maya I noticed that the drains at the entrance to the change rooms had a very large amount of water coming up from them. In fact ALL the drains in that lower area did. Shortly after that we were evacuated from the waterpark. The changerooms had about 3 inches of raw sewage in them, so I took Maya to the closest bathroom and changed her. Anne stood in line and got a refund which will be mailed to us (hopefully). On the way back to meet her I heard the mall was being evacuated. So there went out plans for supper at hooters (best wings EVER). One guy said the water was knee deep in some parts of the parking lot. We wandered around a bit and took some pictures and then went to find the van. Fortunately the water was only up to rims of the tires, however a minivan about 20 feet awat had water up past the bottoms of the doors and a Mini close to it was half submerged. We got out of there and consoled ourselves with a night at the Hilton and supper at East Side Marios. We had gone through all the flooded underpasses just a couple of hours before they got flooded. We only saw a bit of the hail.
Certainly made this portion of our trip interesting!!!