Everyone was hungry by then and we were back at Mini Chef for lunch. We all chose different options and liked them, for the most part. The veggies weren't a huge hit, but the main dishes were all really good.
Isaac was able to help order this time.
So, to order, you take a matching brick of what you want and build it into a flat tower in any design, as long as it's flat. It gets scanned in the machine by putting it in that thing on the bottom right. (You can see that in the left four masterpieces at the top of the picture.) The order then goes on a journey to the kitchen so they can make your food. Joshua however, carefully arranged his pieces in the scanning tray so that they weren't actually stacked and it was funny to see them floating throughout the animation.
While waiting for the food, you can play with your ordering LEGOs or red bricks. Isaac made a creeper face.
Ben made a person.
Joshua made a BIG GORILLA in a hat.
We also put together our mini chefs while they were still in the bag. The story from the waiter this time is that these are the bad mini chefs and they got fired.
We had the red-lidded boxes again. I was hoping for a different color, but oh well.
Next they buseds us over to the factory. This is one of my favorite parts. I'm not sure why, but I really like seeing the molds release the pieces. We got to see the automated bucket movers move around a little bit, but I didn't get to see them take a full bucket off a molding machine. They did beep at our group a few times because we weren't close enough to the wall and couldn't get by. They were making a lot of piece removers when we were there. They only let us bring phones into the lobby, so there aren't many pictures from this part.
It's hard to smile when the sun is bright.
A model of the factory
A polar bear! It was in someone's office so I couldn't get a picture with it, but it was really cute.
Our last part of the official tour was a tour of LEGO house after the other guests left. We were told about the tree and the dinosaurs. There were a bunch of really cool display pieces LEGO fans around the world have made, but this post is already picture heavy. Oh, you might notice an ear bud...they had a microphone and gave us all receivers so that we could actually hear what was going on. It was great.
In the imagination area we all made a duck. I made an only yellow duck - there was one big tub of only yellow bricks. Some people made a duck out of all colors but only bricks, and some people made a duck out of all elements and all colors. I like my duck a lot, but I think I like Joshua's the most.
We moved the to track next and built a car for a single elimination race. Ben won! The last round was Ben vs. Ben and they had very similar cars, but my Ben had the weight on the back and the other Ben had it on the front.
We raced a bit through the last areas as we were short on time - we spent a little bit of time in Miniland, were given a description of emotion area and how our emotions can rub off on others, and then went back to our conference room.
We were all given one of the Billund special edition sets! It's the one with a mini-build for the three building systems of LEGO: Duplo, (normal) Lego and technic. Add that to the suitcase set, flower polybag, Duplo rainbow, and assorted little things (times 4 for each of us) and we ended up with a nice haul.
This officially ended the tour, but they kept the store open for us after everyone else had left. Along with a bunch of Billund-exclusive sets, they had some out-of-print Brinklink Designer program sets. We missed a few of them that looked nice, and so once again, we ended up with a bunch of boxes. We decided to ship these home, along with the large sets that we were given, because we were at the beginning of our trip and not the end. If it had been the end of the trip we would have brought extra bags and packed the sets out of the boxes, but it just wasn't practical for us this time.
We ended up at a pizza place for dinner. It was ok.
On the way home the kids played on some of the sculptures on the sculpture walk, but then half way home the kids and I realized we really, really had to go to the bathroom. We booked it home and left Ben and Cheryl to catch up on their own.
The city was beautiful. It had a ton of things that children were allowed to play on and interesting cityscaping. We joked several times that it seemed as though this trip was for playgrounds with other things in between.
In front of the lion house! This was the family home and workshop of the founder of LEGO.
I have no idea what we did for the rest of the night. I don't have anything in my notes or in my pictures. My guess is that we took showers and went to bed, but I can't confirm that. We knew that Giraffe like to sit on heads, but I never quite realized how much he sleeps on Isaac's head until this trip.
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