Legoland

Today starts with AnnaMay standing by my bed at 4:45.  “Mom, Mom, I need a gau!” This is pronounced like the word gauze without the z sound. For some reason AnnaMay believes that gau is the singular version and gauze is the plural version of this word. This can only mean one thing. She has lost a tooth. I am trying to wake all the way up and get a grip on the world around me. I thankfully did pack gauze. I go and get her some. She is bouncing around very excitedly. Saying Tink is going to be her tooth fairy because we are at Disney. She then states that since it is still night maybe she will come before morning. Uhhhh…no…. I tell her that the tooth fairy rule is before midnight or you have to wait until the next night. (Yup, made that up on the fly.) I get her settled back into bed and head back to bed. I am thinking what in the world are we going to do I did not even know she had a loose tooth. First, Tink is her tooth fairy so we have to do something special. Second, AnnaMay is terrified of loosing teeth so we have a deal that if she can pull it herself the tooth fairy leaves her a treat with her dollar. Now, I don’t have a treat for her. Hmmm. Well, I manage to drift back off to sleep, telling myself that I have the whole day to figure this out.

We get up and get ready to go to LegoLand.  The drive is about 45 minutes from the house. We have to go on a short portion of a toll road.  We pull up to the toll booth and start to drop in our “exact change” as required. But the settings are totally off. Dimes are worth one cent, Nickels are worth 25 cents and pennies are worth a dime. While we are there we also notice they have these envelopes you can take if you do not have the money you can mail them a check. I have never seen such a thing and I wonder in a city with so many foreign visitors how confusing it would be to them.  Anyway, we make it to Lego Land with no issues about 15 minutes before the park opens. Just enough time to go and buy the tickets. I have a buy an adult get a kids ticket free coupon. Just as I am getting in line to buy the tickets I notice it expired 2 weeks ago. Argh! We have newer ones at home. They come every month in AnnaMay’s Lego magazine.  Oh well. nothing I can do now. I decided to see if they will let me use it anyway. They do, in fact they gave me one of the adult tickets for free instead of a kid’s one. SCORE!

We get in line about 2 minutes before the park opens. They do a cute little park opening thing and then we are in the park. We head to guest relations to get AnnaMay’s HERO pass. It is along the lines of a DAS. Although I like the way they handle it and how well marked the HERO entrances are even better than a DAS. We don’t have a plan here we just want to do whatever AnnaMay wants.  The crowds are low enough that there is no need to do anything is any particular order. As we head into the park AnnaMay first decides to head into the Brick Factory gift shop which sells individual bricks. She gets her bag of bricks and spots an iPad they have out with a game on it called Lego Fusion. She seems to really enjoy messing around with it. We head out of the gift shop and we see the 2 story carousel. I think that it is the coolest thing but AnnaMay says she is not interested. Just then a park employee (do they have a special name at Lego Land? I am not sure) struck up a conversation with AnnaMay.  He told her that there were Lego Characters in the building to our left. Well, you can guess where AnnaMay wants to head next.  So we head off to see what characters they have. AnnaMay thought this fountain was beautiful. I love the Lego touches they put around the park and how much open and “green” areas there are.

We head in and meet Stephanie from Lego Friends first.  She was a lot of fun.

Then they have a green screen. Which makes for some fun pictures.

After that we saw Emmet!!! AnnaMay loves him from the Lego movie.

As we leave you can choose to buy pictures if you want. We decided to buy the $35 pass which covers all photos including ride photos that are taken in the park for the day. While we are getting it paid for Max comes out to hang with Emmet. AnnaMay headed back around to say hello. First, she chats with Stephanie again. She asks the cats name. Stephanie says that the cat does not have a name and lets AnnaMay pick it’s name. It is now named Fluffy.

Now, to Max and Emmett!

In this picture AnnaMay tells them to make crazy faces….I guess she did not think about the fact that they can’t change what their expression is….Silly girl!

We leave the character area and head down to an area that talks about farming and the environment. It is really fun. They have solar panels you can move into the sunlight that then turn things on and Bikes that you can pedal to make ceiling fans run.

AnnaMay loved the orange trees with real and Lego oranges on them.

Inside the building they had farm scenes made out of Legos.

We left and AnnaMay wanted to go over to the Medieval part of the park. There was a ride there she rode last time that spins you around while going over little hills. Last time we were there she really enjoyed it. This time we actually walked through and were starting to get on when she decided that it was “too scary.” I did not push to get her to do it since she thought Dumbo went too fast the other day. We exited without riding and moved on to Lost Kingdom Adventure (think Buzz Lightyear ride meets Lego Indiana Jones).  AnnaMay loved this ride so much so that they offered to let her stay on it. We made it through 3 times before she was ready to get off.

Next up she wanted to ride the Safari ride.  It was really cute but seemed really short.  Maybe it was just me…I suppose after Disney’s safari ride anything would seem short. AnnaMay borrowed Jay’s camera and took pictures during the ride.

We got off the Safari and started to head around the park.  At Legoland they have little kiosks with carnival type games in them.  AnnaMay asked to play some. I told her no that they were silly and we moved on. We heard a whirring noise overhead and looked up. It was the Goodyear blimp.  How cool!

AnnaMay thought about going to do driving school, but when we got close she said she was not in the mood. She was starting to act a little off so I thought maybe we were about done for the day.  She saw another set of carnival games and begged me to let her play.  She pointed out it was her money that she had earned. I gave in and let her try.  She picked the one where you have to knock the clowns down to win.  She tried twice and could only get 2 of the 3 clowns down.  The girl manning the game even slipped her 2 extra balls the second time.  Finally the girl threw a ball and knocked the third one down so that she could get a prize.  She picked a little stuffed minion which she carted everywhere with her the rest of the day.

After this she said she was ready to go get some lunch and leave but I noticed that it was time for Brickbeard’s water show to start. I convinced her to give it a try, telling her that we would leave if she did not like it.  It was a really cute, corny water show.  She really got into it by the end.

I have no idea how he rides that in that costume!

After the show you can meet some of the characters.

Since we were right by the gardens we decided to go take a look now before we went to find lunch.  At the beginning of the gardens there is the southern belle made out of Legos.  It makes me laugh because as I was researching Legoland, I found some history about park. One of the things I read was once at Cypress Garden, it got terribly cold and the vines you see as you enter had died. People were coming and seeing that and leaving. So, the owner had some of the girls dress up like southern belles and stand in front of the vines so people would not notice them.  It worked and they ended up becoming an icon of the park.  If you would like to read more of the history you can find it here.  http://www.yesterland.com/cypressgardens.html

AnnaMay wanted to make it to the Florida pool that Mrs. Jillian from Jillycakes had told us was now open but it was after 1:00 and she was hungry so we made it this far and turned back to get some lunch.

Jay did manage to get a few pretty shots though.

As we head back through we glance at Mini Land. It is such a cool place but it gets so hot there in the afternoon. We were hungry so we moved through quickly.  AnnaMay wanted Rotisserie Chicken from the restaurant at the front of the park. As we walk I notice again how much “green” they left in the park.  I really do love that!

On our way past the carousel AnnaMay reminded me about the apple fries I wanted to try last year and the stand was not open so I couldn’t.  I went to buy them while Jay and AnnaMay went to get slushies.  Then we all met at the restaurant and got some lunch.  After lunch we did a little more shopping.  At every store we went in AnnaMay stopped at the iPad and played the Lego Fusion game.  Jay asked me if maybe it would be a good treat from Tinkerbell the Tooth Fairy.  It sounded like a good plan to me.  We managed to sneak and buy it and actually get it all the way to the car without her noticing.  With our shopping done we stopped and picked up our printed picture that we got as an early bird special and headed out of the park.  We were heading out at about 3:00. We snapped a few quick shots with the sign as we were leaving. You can see how tired AnnaMay is.

It was a wonderful day at Legoland.  AnnaMay fell asleep and slept the whole way home.  After we got back we went for our nightly visit to Chef Jose and then went for a swim.  Tomorrow is our last full day at Disney…Can we make it count?