Saturday: Legoland

We finally escaped from the Lego house, having not eaten.  We walked to Legoland.  It isn't a long walk, but it isn't a short walk when you're hungry either.  Then we walked half way through the park to find a closed restaurant.  At this point we were both getting hangry, and so we ended up at a buffet even though we thought it might be more expensive.  (I will admit though, we did eat a lot.)

Ok, now that we were able to properly think again we figured out a plan of attack.  First stop, see the penguins that were visible from the restaurant.  They were very active, and so fun to watch.

Next we went on a few rides.  They were pretty tame, but fun.  However...I think it would have been a better choice to do LegoLand and then the Lego House.  There were very nice Lego sculptures and decorations for the rides, but they were dusty and not nearly as good as the stuff in the Lego house.  I think it will be interesting to see how it changes now that Lego has bought all the Legolands back from the Merlin Group. 

On the way to the Ninjago ride we ran into Mark, Emma, and Colin and sat down with them for a few minutes.  We had started at different sides of the park, so they recommended the 4D movie.  We went on the Ninjago ride, which was still cool but the same as in Florida.  We thought about going through the laser maze, but the line was a little too long for our desire to do it.  The movie was excellent and pretty funny.

At this point Ben was dragging so he went back to the hotel to take a nap.  Since we're both adults, I stayed at the park for a while longer....and started taking pictures.  I went to the SeaLife section.  There was one big tank with lots of different windows.  I have mixed feelings on this tank because it means that most of the exhibit was the same tank and that's a bit boring.  At the same time though, there were different fish visible from each window and different angles on the Lego sculptures, so it worked ok.

I went on the area-viewer thing (see the second picture).  In the first picture you can see our hotel.

Then I went on the Duplo monorail.  This was much better than the area viewer because there was no line and it was just more fun.

Next I decided to do the Jungle Safari.  This might not have been the smartest use of my time, as all the animals could be seen from the road and it was a bit of a wait.  But...it was fun being the only person in the car.  Who's driving this thing?!?

I met up with Birgit and we looked at mini-town for a bit until it was time to go back to the hotel.  There were a ton of different scenes, including windmills from the Netherlands and the Denmark castle.  However, there was a bit of the same feeling as above...if I had seen this first it would have been amazing.  Since I saw it last and it wasn't properly cleaned (spiderwebs, etc), it was just good.

We decided to go to downtown Billund for dinner.  Downtown Billund is not a happening place.  There are several restaurants that were full, but there were few people on the road.  Downtown Billund is right by the Lego house.  I realized that I didn't climb up any of the colored steps and I would be sad if I didn't do that.  So I climbed up the yellow stairs.

We also passed by the System house, and so took a picture.  It's changed since the time our Lego set is based on, but you can still tell it is mostly the same.

This was the house of the Lego founder, whose name I can't remember but could look up.  (I'll admit, I can see the end of the blog posts and really want to finish them.  I should have been more diligent during the trip.)

After a very nice dinner we snuck into the wizard hotel, the next door neighbor to the hotel we were staying it.  Unsurprisingly, it was pretty similar but did have a few different decorations.

We went back to our lobby and sat around talking for a bit.  Then another pair from the tour came by and we talked for a bit, only to find out that the kid had been looking for the monkey samurai minifig.  Well, we had gotten a whole box of minifigs, so we got it out and played "can you feel the minifig?"  It was a ton of fun.  Here are all these adults, sitting around and concentrating very hard on this little green bag that they can't see into.  We found the samurai minifig and then kept going until we had found a full set. 

We stuck around a bit longer, but we hadn't finished packing yet.  The good news was that someone had a luggage scale and our big suitcase was still a few kilos underweight.  This made me feel much better about packing.  (By the time we got to the airport, it was only one kilo under...but that was enough!)

Phew.  Done with the recaps.  It was an excellent trip.  There were no problems.  The kids did really well (and so did the grandparents!).  It was nice to see a different part of the world and connect with people from all over the world that love Lego.

Saturday: explosions

My to-do list has exploded.  Now, some of the tasks won't take very long, but...there's still more on the list than normal.  I did get quite a bit of work done today, even if I wasn't able to cross too many things off the list.

My clean laundry pile has exploded.  I didn't take a picture, but I did need to resort to taking a big box that Isaac thinks he can't part with in order to hold all the clean laundry.  I always feel motivated to get the laundry clean, but after that I don't really care about it at all.

Friday: blah

It was a bit of a crazy day, so here is the day in pictures...

Joshua and I deflated the inflatables.

We started putting together the donut Lego set.

We stopped at the library.

Saturday: extra day - part 1

Ben and I had one more day in Denmark.  When planning the trip we had debated about this extra day, but we were really glad that we had it.  While Legoland ended up being fun but a normal theme park, we hadn't finished Lego House.

So after breakfast we...first had our picture taken with a MiniFig.

Then we wandered over to the Lego House.  We finally got our picture taken in front with the bricks.

We started out in the fish emotion area.  This was one of my favorite spots, although the scanner didn't work quite right and that was rather annoying.  (It would have been an easy fix for the scanner too!)  Anyway, I made two fish.  The first one had a longer tail than what was scanned.  (I also made a teeny, tiny fish and that wouldn't scan at all.)  Below is the scanner with my second fish/squid.  The large size of my squid made it work pretty well.

And Ben's:

Once they're scanned in they pop out of a pipe and start swimming happily...until something happens.

Next up were flowers.  I love seeing Lego flowers and have always thought I should make them.  The limited pieces gave me a nice starting point, and I was able to make my first one!  The only sad thing about this area was that the pieces were far away from the sitting area.

I was really happy with how my flower turned out.

The next section I had a bit of a harder time getting into.  You made jumpy creatures that then went down a vibrating hill or "danced" on a vibrating plate.  The dancing was interesting, but I felt like I didn't know what the goal was when making my creature...I didn't even realize it was supposed to be a creature and so I didn't love it properly.  This was probably more my problem than anything, but it was what it was.

The next part of this little area worked a bit better for me.  We made frogs on lily pads and then put them in a lake that was an air table and they floated around.

My frog ended up with a few too many pieces, but otherwise I liked how it turned out.

We found an outside spot!  There an an outside spot for every zone...we didn't find all of them, and some where better than others.  It's mainly a small play ground of sorts, although the ones we saw did seem to be quite different.  We didn't stay long...Legos work well with our adult minds but we didn't really need to play on the play equipment.

The last thing we needed to do was make a stop-motion movie.  (Really, we should have done this on Friday.  It was getting very, very busy in the house by this time.  This wait wasn't too bad, but by the time we left (you get 20 minutes) the line was quite long.)  Ben and I had plans for this poor guy to be thrown into the water by all sorts of things, but it turns out the moving in small increments you can't really do much in 20 minutes.


At this point we had done everything in Lego House.  (Although I heard there was a mosaic lab that we missed.)  We wanted to do the robot mammoth driving again, but the line was too long.  So we made some apartment buildings.  Below you can see that I put mine in a spot that made a lot of people happy...the red people were looking for a place to live.

 Ben's:

We tried making our way downstairs to eat, but kept getting distracted...

We finally made it down to the cafe, only to find that the wait was over an hour.  It's too bad, because they have some robots that help with your meal.  You order using different blocks and it comes out in a Lego brick container.

We had at least been able to see these guys at the first designer dinner.  A lady was explaining the food and the robots were just waving their arms behind her, almost like they were making fun of her.  Ben and I found it hilarious, no one else seemed to crack a smile.

Every day that you go to Lego house you get a unique 6-block combination.  There are around 915 million combos that you can make with six bricks 2x4 bricks.  (This got mentioned many times.  This is also why they can say "The possibilities are endless."  Imagine what you could do with five red blocks and a green block!)  Anyway, they print out a card with your combination and you can get a set of 6 red 2x4 blocks that are made right there.  I don't think I got a picture of the machine, but it was cool.

Ok, this post got long too so I'm going to split it up.