One of the last things we did on our vacation was go to Legoland. We were super excited to go. Neither of had ever been and Jason loves Legos. Unfortunately it was the most disappointing part of our trip. We actually now refer to Leogland as the Land of Disappointment.
We got there when they opened because our hotel neighbors woke us up super early and we had to check out anyways. Normally we are never anywhere right when it opens so this was exciting! Not so much. Even though they let you in at 9am, all you can do is get coffee or shop in the first 2 shops. The rest of the park is chained off! At 9:30 they open one section of the park, which means everyone piles into the 2 open line queues because nothing else opens until 10! Made for lots of cranky people.
Anyways the big thing to do at Legoland is of course see Lego sculptures in the Miniland where they have models of a bunch of cities and all the other cool Lego stuff around the park. They definitely had some cool stuff but so much of it was broken and dirty!
Whatever they use to protect the legos isn't really working. The stuff is peeling off of everything! Hard to see in the photos unless its on a dark color like the pyramid above. Or course the elements are going to be rough on plastic, but when you pay almost Disneyland prices to go to a theme park its rather disappointing to see such disrepair.
Lots of the Lego people in the scenes had fallen over or broken. You could tell they had been like that a long time. The picture on the left was in the Vegas section. The fallen over guy makes it look like a murder and I find it very had to believe that is what they want you to take away from that scene.
A amazing amount of the animatronics were broken. That is a bit hard to take a picture of, but from the photo on the left you would guess that if there was a button in front of the scene, pushing it would make something happen. It didn't. The picture on the right I drew some arrows pointing to the lego ducks that you can barely see because they blend in with the rocks of the empty pond.
Not all was bad though. How could it be? They have lego Darth Vader.
The Miniland is much newer than the majority of things in the park so it looked really nice. It let you see how things could be! The Star Wars displays were very impressive, as all the displays were, but they didn't lose the impressive factor when you got closer since they weren't falling apart.
They also had a really cool walk-through indoor area where you were supposed to spot the hidden lego keys. This was awesome! It took you through an Artic, Egypt, and rain forest themed areas. This was indoor so the legos were in much better condition since they aren't exposed to the elements and the animatronics worked. Legoland would have been more fun, we thought, if it had more areas like this. Unfortunately, the lighting made for bad pictures with my less than great camera.
We did see some Lego animals which were really cool. Of course I have to show you the Lego animals that are also Squshies. Hannah the Giraffe, Reginald the Rhino, Oscar the Lion and Laurence the Panda. All the animals are from the safari ride
Which bring me to the rides. None of the rides at the park are particularly great. They are more for kids. The lines though are incredibly slow! Even the short lines take an amazingly long time because they do such a horrible job of loading. Then when you get on the ride it flies through the lego sculptures and tons of the animatronics are broken. Very disappointing.
Legoland would definitely be more fun with kids since they won't notice a lot of the things we did, but as adults we were very disappointed. Legoland is not cheap! For the amount of money you pay to get in the park you expect a certain amount of quality and cleanliness and it wasn't there. If you bought a day ticket, they had a place where you could get a ticket to come back in October. We didn't bother to get our free ticket. We were so disappointed we won't be going back.