Legoland – The Day After

We went to Legoland this weekend for the kids’ first time and had a blast.  We’ve been promising Legoland for awhile now, so this was the kids big pay off.  We live just down the road from Legoland in California, so there really isn’t any excuse for us not to go.  Well, besides it being expensive and all our other normal day to day things we do.

We promised Super Michael that we would go for his birthday back in August and he’s been saving his birthday money to buy something special.  We finally had a free Saturday, so we headed down to the coast in Carlsbad and made a day of it.  Currently, Legoland is doing something called “Brick or Treat” where they have a lot of Halloween decorations up and have a haunted trail and all the Halloween fun.  The kids get a goodie bag, walk the Lego themed trail and collect their treats.  They got stuff like a Lego Club Magazine, a special Halloween brick, and an Apple.

Super Michael, in particular is quite fond of Legos, so this was really a cool trip for him.  The first half an hour he was kind of in awe and just walked around speechless.  We had to kind of prod him because he was just in shock and didn’t know what he wanted to do. 

As you can see by the pictures, EVERYTHING is made up of millions of Legos.  Some of the bigger things in the park have hundreds of thousands of individual Legos all by themselves.  The cityscape below is just one piece of a large area that reproduces places across America.  Everything from San Francisco in this picture, to Las Vegas, New York, New Orleans, and of course Southern California amongst other areas.

Since we live so close, and the fairly high price of the tickets normally ($65 for adults, $55 for kids), we opted for the annual passes for around the price of two trips to the park. The passes we have include the Aquarium next door which is normally an added cost to enter. I’m sure we’ll be back much more though, since there’s just no way with two small kids to see everything in the park on the same day.

I worked over in Carlsbad ten years ago when Legoland opened, and to introduce Legoland to the community, the park allowed businesses to tour the park for free a few times.  Oh COURSE we took advantage and went, but because it was so knew, it really wasn’t that exciting at the time. All the trees were small and they hadn’t really built the park out to what it is now.  They had a few rides here and there, and then a part of mini-land built (the Lego town).

I was completely impressed with how well the park has built up and the wide assortment of stuff they have for everybody to do.  Even the trees are all grown up now!  They have so many activities and the park seems so much larger now. 

If you have kids in the Lego age range, this would be a highly recommended trip.  This is probably as close to Lego nirvana that your Legomaniac can get.  However, save your pennies, because this is a high cost vacation.  And you couldn’t get a more scenic area if you were coming out here for vacation.  Carlsbad is one of our nicer areas.  It’s close to the beach and everything else going on down here in SoCal.

And what did Michael get with his birthday money?  A HUGE Star Wars AT-AT Walker!  Next trip we’re getting the Star Wars Lego Visual Dictionary in honor of Sci-Fi Dad! :)