vacation Wednesday, part 1 (June 10): Legoland

Today's activity was Legoland!  Once again, and based on other Legoland parks, we weren't sure we'd end up staying the whole day but we absolutely did.  We enjoyed the early entry half hour and left with about a minute to spare.

We ate breakfast at the hotel.  The food was again excellent.  Ben was able to continue his streak of having a soft boiled egg, I had bread and cheese, but there were still the normal breakfast foods too.

Outside our door:

Going to the other building for breakfast:

We walked through the other LEGO hotel on the way to the park.  It had many cool sculptures and we found a lot of favorite animals.

The early entry didn't apply to very many things.  We were able to walk around mini land, but we enjoyed that.  We saw several places that we expected to see in the near future, and there was a really nice replica of Fehmarn.  While I had never heard of this, it is the largest construction site in Northern Europe.  There is a tunnel factory and then the tunnel piece is floated over to the right spot and sunk in the water...and the exhibit showed several of these parts moving around and sinking.

Now you can see where we went yesterday on our roof adventures: up the yellow steps, through the French fries and rocket ship (although I'm not sure if I included any of those pictures), on the roof, down to the submarine, on the surfboards, and down blue stairs.)

Ben had done his amazing thing and figured out the rides we should go on first.  In the end, it didn't matter because the park wasn't very busy and we never had to wait more than two cycles for a ride.  But one never knows, so it's good to have a plan.

We went to the speedway battling coasters first!  It was nice and smooth and pretty fast.  They let us switch from one coaster to the other without having to go through the whole line too!

Then the dragon coaster.  It was not as exciting as I expected.  There was fun stuff to look at while the ride was starting (castle-type stuff with dragons and ogres) but then the roller coaster part was all of about twenty seconds.  We were able to go on this one twice too, so I took some pictures the second time.

Then the polar expedition.  This was my favorite!  It was pretty fast and then it stopped and we watched an animation.  I expected that to be the end of the ride, so imagine my surprise when the whole coaster dropped a few feet.  It was probably an even smaller drop, but since I wasn't expecting it at all it was great fun.  (Ben and a child often rode in the front of the coasters, especially since the lines were so short.  This is one time that it didn't work out as well for them because they could see the track.)  We went on this at least three times, but not three times in a row.

After this it rained a bit.  We went to the Emmitt's couch ride, which is inside and kind of like Soarin'.  We didn't have the best of seats, but it is still a fun ride and got us out of the rain.  (It wasn't quite raining enough to get our rain coats out, but it was getting close.  There was the tiniest of overhangs to stand under while we waited to get on the ride, and that was enough.)  While waiting, it was rainy and sunny at the same time.  The weather was actually quite crazy and it kept trying to rain throughout the morning but then stopping enough.  I said something about the fact that there should be a rainbow somewhere and Ben said "I see a rainbow."  He was talking about the permanent rainbow on the ride across the street.

It was sunny again by the time we got out, so three of us decided to do the ride across the street.  It ended up being a ton more fun than I was expecting.  I was expecting a somewhat bouncy ride, but the ups and downs were just right.  Enough to be fun, not enough to feel yucky.  While we were on the ride Cheryl had apparently told Ben something like, "Keep an eye on my purse" and so they gave it a mini-photo shoot.