Mall of America: Miles and smiles — under one roof

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Minnesota isn't known for moderate weather. But blizzardlike winters, blinding rainstorms or muggy summers don't deter shoppers at the Mall of America, where it's always a dry, comfortable 70 degrees.

In fact, you can catch the light-rail transit from downtown Minneapolis on one end, or the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on the other end, and ride it right inside the mall's parking garage, missing any bad weather.

That's exactly what my 17-year-old daughter, Amy, and I did on a rainy day several months ago. We sloshed from the Graves 601 Hotel in downtown Minneapolis to the light-rail stop. For the cost of $1.50 per ticket, we stayed warm and dry, and in only 35 minutes we entered the Mall of America's surreal shopping paradise. This is the largest retail/entertainment complex in the United States and the second-largest mall in the world, with top honors going to the West Edmonton Mall in Canada.

Before the trip, Amy visited mallofamerica.com and mapped the locations of stores she wanted to visit. She had seen many of them in her monthly Seventeen magazine, and none of them were found in our neighborhood mall. This was a good idea, because we only had about 10 hours to blitz the place. With 520 shops, if you spent only 10 minutes in each store, it would still take you 86 hours to visit them all, according to the mall management's calculations. And since the mall is so big that 258 Statues of Liberty could lie inside it, you'd be exhausted in the process.

And why travel all the way to Minnesota just to shop at the same old stores you could visit at home?

I'm not much of a shopper. But there are plenty of ways to entertain yourself while others in your group are dropping their cash:

• An indoor amusement park

• A 1.2 million-gallon aquarium

• A 14-screen movie theater

• 20 sit-down restaurants

• 30 fast-food restaurants

• A four-story LEGO Play Area

The mall also hosts various events and guest appearances. The largest, an 'NSYNC autograph signing in 1999, attracted 20,000. So, it's possible to spend a full day there and leave without buying anything.