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.
