Our Trip to Carlsbad: Day 4

On day four, we headed to Legoland...


We had heard good things about this amusement park, so we wanted to try it out. They were actually doing a special ticket offer online where you got 5 days for the price of 1...and it was a hopper ticket that allowed you to get into Legoland, the Legoland Waterpark & the Sea Life Aquarium. We decided to do that, even though we knew we wouldn't use all 5 days. Hey, it was the same price as one day...why not?

Unfortunately, none of us felt like Legoland lived up to its expectations. Don't get me wrong, the Miniland area in Legoland was AWESOME!!! They have built lots of major cities in miniature version with Legos. It's very impressive. We spent quite a bit of time there just walking around. (I'll post pictures of all of it when I give you the rundown on Day 6.) But, the rides were a huge disappointment to us. Let me explain why...

First of all, they were pretty lame rides...even the roller coasters were boring. Connor, who is only 8-years-old, only liked one of the rollercoasters. Everything else was pretty tame, even for him.

Second, Legoland is slightly overprotective with their rides. Almost every ride required one adult for each child going on the ride...even the kiddie rides. There was this little helicopter ride that just went up and down, up and down. That's all it did. It was less-dangerous than the kiddie helicopter ride at Lagoon, for you Utahns that have been there. And, they required each child to be with an adult in order to ride it! This would have been fine except that we had more children than adults. So, some of the adults would take some of the kids while the other adults stayed to watch the babies and other children. Then we would try to switch up people on the next ride. Since each ride had lines that were 45 minutes or longer, we didn't get on many rides & were pretty bummed.

So, I've decided that Legoland would be the perfect amusement park for a family of 4 that has a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. If you have a child that is younger than 4, chances are that they can't go on a lot of the rides, even the kiddie rides (again with the overprotective thing). And, if you have a child older than 6, chances are they will be bored by 95% of the rides. And, you can only be a family of four so that you have one adult per child. Otherwise, you'll be playing the waiting game like we did all day long. So, Legoland doesn't get very high marks from this family of 6. Next time, I'll take my family (& money) to Sea World instead.

Nevertheless, we tried to have a good time & found a few rides that we thought were okay. This was the first ride we went on this day. It was a boat tour that took you around to various Lego creations, like this small version of the Eiffel Tower...


The kids' favorite ride was probably this Lego car track...

The big kids (6-years-old and up) were able to drive their own cars through this little Lego city. They weren't on tracks or anything. The kids could just drive wherever they wanted to. There were stop lights, stop signs, yield signs, etc that the kids were supposed to obey. Let's just say that there were several crashes...and that one of my children (Aiden) may have caused some of those accidents. I'm pretty sure we know which parent he takes after (Mike). Connor was a very cautious driver & obeyed most of the rules. At least one of my children inherited my fabulous driving abilities... :)

For the little kids (3- to 5-years-old), they were able to drive their cars on a little circular track. Cohen loved it, once he finally figured out that you have to push the gas pedal to make the car go...

We also found another ride that was worthwhile, it was a Lego Pirateship ride where the "cannons" were waterguns that you could shoot at other people on the ride & at people waiting on the shore...

We were having a great time on this ride...until it decided to stop for some reason right when we were in the line of fire from a watergun on the shore. The little boy that was running it had the greatest time drenching me from head-to-toe, while his white trash mom just laughed and laughed and egged him on to "shoot the lady some more." Thank you woman...thank you very much. Glad you're teaching your five-year-old to be such a gentleman. I looked like a drowned dog for the rest of the day.

After that, we decided to walk through Mini Star Wars land. This was the same concept as Miniland, except it was scenes from the Star Wars movies. The spaceships & tanks actually made shooting sounds and motions in the battle scenes. My boys, being the huge Star Wars fans that they are, thought they had died and gone to heaven...

The boys also made a few friends in Star Wars Land...

So, that was our first day at Legoland. We gave the park a second & even third chance to redeem itself, but it never really grew on us. It's too bad. I think it's a really cute concept & I think they did a good job on some of the rides, but their rules were way too overprotective and didn't work for our bigger family. It won't be making my list of favorite amusement parks anytime soon. --Lindsay