Subject:
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My Legoland CA opening day trip report [long]
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lugnet.reviews
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Date:
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Sun, 4 Apr 1999 02:46:58 GMT
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After having put this on rec.toys.lego, I'm posting this here at Larry's
suggestion. :)
At long last -- here's my Legoland California trip report! :)
The park is tailored strongly towards kids and enthusiasts. Since I'm
more the latter than the former, this trip report is focused more on
enthusiasts than on kids. (That is, I didn't go on many rides, so I
won't say much about them.)
Refer to "http://www.legolandca.com/general.idc" for a general map of
the park. It's generally laid out as a circle around the lake; from the
park entrance, you can go to either Village Green or Imagination Zone
and therefore go around the lake in either direction.
My group (four people) arrived at the park at 8:30am on the morning of
Saturday, March 20 -- just in time for a brief opening ceremony, and
then they let us in right afterwards! The park was nearly deserted
until the official opening at 10am. My group got to Fun Town before 10,
and we were the only people there. :)
But you're more interested in a play-by-play of what's at the park, so
here goes. :)
Immediately next to the park entrance is The Big Shop. One large room
that's roughly the same size as the Lego Imagination Center in Florida,
it appears to carry most of what's in the current Shop-at-Home catalog;
noticeably missing were service packs (and I don't remember seeing much
Technic there but I was preoccupied), but they also have lots of
Legoland CA tee shirts, pins, pencils, and other souvenir items
(including a new version of the Legoland Ambassador Keychain!
"http://www.ee.nmt.edu/~jmathis/legolandminifig.html"). If you want
them to, they'll hold your purchases for you until you're ready to leave
the park -- this was very handy, since the first thing I did upon
entering the park was to buy two complete collections of Star Wars. :)
I also ran into Tom Stangl here, but wasn't too surprised. ;)
Oh, before I forget -- park employee badges are a red 4x8 plate with
three yellow 2x2 flats on them, on which is a clear sticker with the
employee's name printed on it. No name badges are sold for park guests
(such as Disney's red "Guest of Honor" badges), but unlike Disney, you
can make a badge for yourself if you're so inclined. :) Also worth
noting here is that there are a few souvenir penny-pressing machines
around the park. Each one offers four designs, and I found five of
these machines around the park. Each penny you want to press costs two
quarters (plus the penny). If you want souvenir pressed pennies, make
sure you carry enough change, because the machines aren't necessarily
near any shops or stands that can make change for you.
Back to the park attractions. Outside The Big Shop was a "model
citizen" -- a "life-size" walkaround minifig (blue overalls, blue pants,
blue cap, standard smiley face). He looked a bit stiff, but the
children seemed to like him. He was the only walkaround we saw all day.
We went clockwise around the lake from there. Next stop was the Village
Green, in which is a safari ride (the vehicles are one- or two-person
gas-powered cars, I think). We skipped the ride, but it's surrounded by
life-size Lego zebras and monkeys and elephants and other animals. A
path behind one hedge reveals a Lego lioness with her cubs. Very cute!
We did go on the Fairy Tale Brook later that day. It's a gentle boat
ride (each boat is a 'leaf' with two seats, each seating about two
people) through some Lego fairytale sculptures: the Three Little Pigs
getting their house blown down by the Big Bad Wolf, Sleeping Beauty
being kissed by a prince, Hansel and Gretel looking clueless, et cetera.
At the end of the ride all the characters are dancing around together.
The weirdest thing about this ride was that hidden speakers through the
queue area were playing the sound of someone drowning (probably a troll
you see at one point in the ride) -- "Glub! Gallub! Gloob!" Over and
over and over again. Very weird.
The Water Works was cute; there's a row of giant Lego musical
instruments which you can make play music and squirt water by standing
on a dot in front of them. Another area lets you aim jets of water at
alligators (complete with dangling tonsils!) and frogs. It's cute, the
kids loved it, there was ample opportunity to get wet, but I saw
something that looked like a giant hot-air hand dryer outside there so
presumably kids can use it to dry off. A Duplo village was nearby, with
lots of little houses and slides for kids.
There was another shop here, a sports-oriented one, but I don't recall
finding anything interesting in it. FYI, only a few shops beyond The
Big Shop sold any Lego sets, and even then they were only small ones.
The shops focused on souvenirs and candy. (Like Disneyland, no chewing
gum is sold inside Legoland.)
Since it was beginning to get cold and drizzly, we sat for a bit to
listen to a ventriloquist and his two puppets: a showoff vulture and an
insecure parrot. His show could use a little more polish (which it'll
undoubtedly get with time), but it was really funny and well worth the
stop!
Next stop: The Ridge. We skipped the Sky Cycle and the Kid Power Tower,
but the Amazing Maze was good fun. (All four of us were surprised to
find it not as easy as we expected!) In the middle of the maze is a
great vantage point from which you can see the whole rest of the park.
Oh, let me mention something important here: IF YOU GO TO LEGOLAND,
BRING BINOCULARS. If you don't, you'll wish you had. There are a few
telescopes around (bolted to railings) for kids to use, but they're few,
far-between, and low to the ground. Binoculars are great for examing
the Lego creations from a distance, and for seeing fine detail when
you're as close to them as you can get (a fence keeps you a few feet
away from the beautiful buildings in Miniland). You may also want to
bring a notepad, like I did, to take notes -- other people (hi Tom) have
already photographed everything in the park and put it up on web sites.
If you take a lot of photos, you'll later forget why you got a
particular shot... better to write down what you're thinking while
you're at the park!
Fun Town is fun. We skipped the kiddie rides (Driving School, Skipper
School, Sky Patrol, etc.) and went into the buildings instead.
The Adventurers' Club is a tour through rooms themed to look like a
jungle cave, an Egyptian temple, and an ice cavern. The 'story' is that
you need to find six keys hidden through the areas (the keys spell I - M
- A - G - I - N, and they are shown at the end of your tour on a plate
with an E on it). The keys are hidden well enough that you're happy to
find them after a few moments of searching -- they're not all obvious,
but kids will be able to find them. And the Lego sculptures in this
area are beautiful, especially the 'murals' in the Egyptian section.
Look for the mural with a guy holding a camcorder!
The Lego Factory has four stages showing purportedly 'slowed-down' Lego
production machines. The first shows you red 2x4 bricks being molded
while you watch (by a mechanism labeled 'http://www.plasquip.dk/'), the
second shows you the 'Lego' logo being silkscreened onto 1x4x4 yellow
pieces (thin 'container' walls) while you watch, and the third shows
wheels being snapped onto 2x4 axle bricks, and the fourth shows you all
three previous pieces being put into boxes. However, look closely: the
machines aren't actually creating anything! The silkscreening machine
takes a blank piece and outputs a piece with a logo, but if a piece
which already bears a logo somehow makes it down the line to the
silkscreening machine, it outputs a blank piece! Turns out it's just
swapping the pieces that go into it. While we watched, a Lego employee
was frantically trying to catch the pieces which were going through the
system 'backwards' and remove them.
Cool Club has some great creations inside, most notably a map of
southern California made in an unusual way -- the water was a sea of
wavy blue flags (looking down on their tops!), the mountains were
tightly-packed minifigs wearing cowboy hats, et cetera. Very clever!
Also here is the Fun Town Market, which is the park's ONLY restaurant
with interior seating. By mid-afternoon it was really cold and wet
outdoors, and of course the restaurant was packed tight with no hope of
getting a seat inside. But near the front are some display cases with
some old Lego sets in great condition (a pirate ship, a Homemakers set
from the 70's, a little blue shovel truck and a tow truck from the early
70's, and some Samsonite sets) which are definitely worth seeing.
Castle Hill was the next stop through the park, and it was my favorite
area. The Enchanted Walk is a beautiful stroll across two small
bridges, and the walk is surrounded by butterflies, dragonflies,
rabbits, foxes, quail, and trout which glisten with translucent bricks.
We ate at The Knight's Table (note that the 'icecubes' on the Coca-Cola
signs are in the shape of 2x2 Duplo blocks, and that there are minifigs
on the Minute Maid signs), then shopped at King's Market. There you can
buy a plush green Lego dragon with red wings, nicely-made foam shields
(with either a Royal Knights or a Wolfpack logo, and velcro straps to
hold it to your arm), and foam swords and katana. If you feel like
building, there's a small hut here with LOTS of Lego castle wall pieces
in bins inside, and plenty of plates to build on.
I skipped the Dragon roller-coaster -- perhaps next time!
Finally... Miniland. THIS is why I came to the park. I easily spent
about two hours scribbling down a dozen pages of detailed notes on the
place... the sheer level of detail on the buildings is simply
astounding, and the way they use conventional pieces in nonconventional
ways is awe-inspiring. I'm going to post another post filled with
nothing but my notes from Miniland. :) For now, suffice it to say that
you should look for the dead chickens hanging in the window of a grocery
store in Chinatown.
Interestingly enough, while Miniland used a vast and wide array of rare
pieces for all sorts of clever purposes, they used what appeared to be
ABS chaff -- raw plastic granules -- for things such as garbage in trash
cans, scrub vegetation, and cargo in one of the barges. Also, many of
the creations in Miniland were crawling with tiny, tiny speck-bugs, only
visible through binoculars. Weird. The buildings use mostly 'official'
lego colors, including lots of brown and green and a little bit of pink,
but no orange. They also use far too much of the new light blue that
appears only in two Throwbots sets, and they even use some translucent
light blue which has never appeared in any set, as far as I know.
Cars, trucks, trains, and boats continually wend their way through
Miniland. The cars and trucks are guided by wires under the road, and
they even make some stops. One sign says that the vehicles in Miniland
are controlled by twelve computers and 300,000 yards of wire. Yow!
It was around here that I ran into the President of Legoland -- a
twelve-year-old boy named Thomas Michon who had gotten the title for the
day. He gave me his autograph and the URL of his web site
("http://come.to/tbmichon"), and I gave him my Netscape business card
and the URL to Lugnet ("http://www.lugnet.com/"). It turns out he's
actually fairly famous -- his Lego skills have gotten him onto several
talk shows! Accompanying him was a Lego employee (nametag "CAR") who
identified herself as the Mayor of Legoland. She told me that all of
the models in the park were coated with fifteen layers of ultraviolet
protection, but even so they're replaced every three to five years. The
miniature trees used in the park are also replaced every few years, and
it's possible for fans to purchase the old ones.
Also around this area I noticed a guy wearing a Lugnet tee shirt --
turns out it was Larry Pieniazek and family!
The last area was the Imagination Zone, but I spent so much time in
Miniland that I didn't have much time here. It's got lots of areas to
sit and build with anything from Duplo to Mindstorms, and it's got an
impressive sculptire of Einstein's head and a larger-than-life dinosaur
made of giant bricks that are made from Lego bricks. Wow. :)
One final stop on our way to finishing our loop around the lake was the
boat ride through the lake itself. I wasn't impressed -- it tries to be
cute and serious at the same time; the woman driving the boat kept
talking about the Lego models (the Eiffel Tower, Mount Rushmore, the Taj
Mahal, etc.) as if they were their real-life counterparts. When she
said "this took thirty years to build," I think some people thought she
meant the models. Also, only Mount Rushmore's faces were Lego; I think
I've seen a much better-looking sculpture of it which was entirely Lego,
including the surrounding rock.
A sign somewhere in the park said that thirty million Lego bricks were
used in its construction. That actually seems a bit low to me. There
were a LOT of sculptures... but believe it or not, even though I'm a
rabid enthusiast, I got a little tired of them (except Miniland) near
the end. Most of the sculptures outside Miniland were made entirely of
2xN bricks; given an unlimited supply of Lego, some experience working
with three-dimentional sculptures, and plenty of time and patience, I
don't see why anyone here couldn't have made them. I guess once you've
seen a thirty-four-foot-long red dinosaur made entirely of 2xN bricks,
it'll take a lot to be impressed again. ;)
Two other random observations about the park: Unlike Disneyland, there
is no ambient music piped over the loudspeakers at the park. Music is
apparently reserved for only a few of the queue areas. Also, wild birds
haven't found the park yet, so parkgoers don't yet have to fight off
pigeons and seagulls.
That's all for now -- I'll post detailed notes about Miniland when I get
a chance!
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: My Legoland CA opening day trip report [long]
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| (...) Thanks for that - its interesting to note the simiaraties between LLCA and LL Windsor. We too have "The Big Shop", our park employees also wear badges that are a red 4x8 plate with three yellow 2x2 flats on them. We also have a Fairy Tale (...) (26 years ago, 7-Apr-99, to lugnet.reviews)
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