Mall'd Out

 Menlo Park Mall. It's a park AND a mall? Still have pictures from that one extra vacation day that we had to blow, and went to a bunch of malls in the same day. This one was a lot larger than we remembered, and we were plenty tired by the time we got there. So we were still eager to get some pictures to share but also a little "ugh" about it, too.

I could probaby do a whole day's-worth of pictures in an art gallery store. But not today. I thought this was a little better way to get a picture with a big "Menlo Park" sign on it, to let you know where we are. You can see some art through the window.

Looks like the Nordstrom does embroidery! Cool! We are familiar with that. I wonder what file format they use? Would it be cool if we gave them a bunch of embroidery art files to use?

Various Grogu plushies at the Disney Store. Get your favorite moment of this little cutie.

Collector Central? In the Disney Store, everything is collectable, right? Why would they need to point it out to you?

A whole store called "squishable"? Yesss please! My friend rolls his eyes as I urge him to go in there. Surely there's got to be some cute stuff in there. Cute... stuff? Sorry for the bad pun.

Medieval plague doctor is... cute. Is that currently relevant to the global pandemic situation? Might make a good um, souvenir for like, all of 2020.

Most of the plushies in here are in the factory bags, which is good even though they are a little less-cute through the plastic. There was all kinds of fun characters, here's an avocado puppy.

Soccer puppy. Is kicking this cruel or... what you are supposed to do. I can't resist saying..... GOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL!!!!! Probably could have taken other cute pictures in there but you get an idea of how cute these things are.

There was a store here that we didn't remember, that we surely would have remembered if we had seen it. It was called True Believers and it was a sort of comic book thrift shop. Right in the mall!

All kinds of figures and colletibles, a mix of vintage and new. We were sort-of "malled-out" at this point, but energized by seeing so much cool stuff. We could have taken a ton more pictures in here.

Deadpool t-shirt where he's breaking the fourth wall to insult you for wearing his t-shirt. Whoa! That's "meta"!

The glass cabinets are great for keeping the rare expensive figures safe and all, but plenty terrible for taking pictures. It's super hard not to get our reflections in the glass or some kind of glare right over where we want to get the picture. We were too tired to try, and instead got like, a far-away shot instead. Maybe you can zoom in and find some treasures.

I know that "chic" is a type of fashion, but I glanced an just saw "Western Chick" and thought, how old is this Barbie that they got away with that? Has Barbie ever been called a "Chick"?

A mixture of various-era G.I. Joe figures. My friend does not remember somebody named Crazy Legs who looks like a paratrooper.

There was a minatures section and we grabbed a picture of a paintable Transformers Arcee and a sweet Dominion Battle Cruiser from Star Trek. If you need to know, this particular ship is the one that Red Squad tried to take on but that didn't go so well for the USS Valiant.

OMG who else remembers Silverhawks? Remember that Minty is from the 80's so I remember things from back then. Do yourself a favor and at least google-up the theme song.

Wow. OHHH WOW! These must be actual original still-in-package G.I. Joe figures. That Destro figure has a pricetag that says $1799.99! Should these be in a museum instead? How can you pay that much and not open it up? But I bet you can find a Destro not in the package for a lot lot less.

All kinds of figures behind the register area. Including those cool really-good Masters of The Universe ones. We tried to get a picture so we could zoom-in on the pricetags but they are too blurry to read. We were too tired to ask them at the time.

Hey! Here's some Pokemon cards! Are they the ones buying them up from everywhere? Seriously why are Pokemon cards so hard to find these days?

Another picture we tried to take behind the counter that failed to be detailed enough to read the prices. Maybe you can still see something cool back there.

They did some Transformers and G.I. Joe collaborations in the past, here's some random figure boxes. Not that big of a deal, except we see a character named... Serpentress? Oh, we have to look that up! We remember Serpentor; he was an attempt by Cobra to genetically engineer a super leader by using DNA from history's greatest conquerors. Serpentress we don't remember.

In case you were wondering, yes there is a giant wall of POP! Figures in this store. Of course there would be! Just one picture of the wall, not zoomed-in on several characters. I'm sure there would have been rare or special ones we could have singled out.

This store is pretty cool and we could have taken a lot more pictures if we weren't so beat-up with all of the malls and pictures we already took today. I'm sure we'll come back again and get more pictures some other day.

One last picture from the ride home. We were lucky enough to get stopped at the light right in from of the new Jollibee so we got a quick picture over the shoulder, also lucky the picture came out okay and no other cars blocked the view! Looks like the drive thru is backed into the street almost. I'll point out the big concrete barrier in the road is known as a "Jersey Wall" and these streets do not have left turn lanes. So even though the Jollibee is right over there, there's no quick way to get there, you have to turn right and circle back to the U-turn at the next light if you can. It's plenty confusing to anybody unfamiliar with the traffic patterns and even for those of us who know, it's still awful.