Legoland

Life is hectic. So how do you deal with it? I know how I do. I look forward to the next vacation. It sounds kind of cheesy when I say it (or write it), but it is the truth. I like having a plan for something fun to do with the family, and so far our favorite is the canned vacation to a theme park or other "touristy" location. There is a fair helping of irony to this, since I don't really like crowds, don't enjoy cities and spend a lot of time away from home already, but as I found in some of my earliest blog posts, there is something about being on vacation with the family.


So we picked up and went to Legoland. It is part of our commitment to lay off of Disneyland for a while. I have a goal of visiting all of the other major So Cal theme parks before going back.

One of the coolest things about Legoland is simply all of the lego sculptures. They truly were amazing. Everthing you see here is constructed out of regular stock Lego bricks.

Heather and I saw Hagrid, and both immediately went for a picture. Logan was our photographer on this trip, so we were able to get a few shots of just us.

We couldn't turn down Harry either.

Jeff and Rachelle's fam met us out there, and we ate at this great restaurant twice... umm, I forgot the name. Maybe someone can remind me? Anyway, we were there in between Collin's and Trenton's brithday, so they got to stand on their chairs and be recognized. The cousins were in rare form that night, if I remember correctly. Oh, to be young and so excited about life...

Taryn was a good sport. At Legoland, the little kids have to wait in line with everyone else so the parents can switch on the ride. She did pretty well, and as always, we love to take pictures of her.

Collin turned 11 on this trip. He is growing up on us.

Yeah, work it baby.

I think she has a thing for bald guys...

They did pretty much the whole Vegas strip. The detail was pretty cool. I did find it interesting that the are working hard to create recognizable characters out of their Lego guys, yet they didn't use the standard Lego guys in their model. They built people out of bricks instead. Weird.

We realized that we didn't have a jacket for Taryn anymore, so on the way out of town we stopped at our favorite store: the Disneyland outlet store and got her this Mickey jacket. She loved it, and it turned out to be a good idea because it was cold the whole time we were there. (Highs in the 60's in the second week of July??)

Another cool thing was the technic classes. You could sign up to come back and play with these robots. You plugged them into a computer, programmed them to do certain tasks, and then tested it on this special table. The boys loved it. I loved it. I only wish they would have just let us play on our own a while longer.
All made out of Legos. Pretty cool, huh.
They had some 3-D shows, one of which was Bob the Builder. Taryn really wanted to go see Bob, until she got there. Then she remembered how shy she is, and how big Bob is up close. Still, Taryn seems to pull us more toward characters than the other kids have.

Wow. look at our little family.
So one of the down sides of Legoland was that the rides left a lot to be desired. This is one of the few that Taryn went on, and she loved it, but overall the rides were a disappointment. They were all scaled down compared to DLand, and you can tell that they just didn't spend the money on them. The cheese factor was pretty high. But still, we can say we experienced it.