Disneyland or Legoland? Legoland or Disneyland? What to do with our last full day in San Diego before taking the redeye home sweet home?
Well, with the assistance of M3, who kindly answered some questions for me via email, we ultimately decided on Legoland since we did Disneyworld last year and plan on visiting again this year.
LL was a relatively short drive up the coast and we made it in plenty of time to get ourselves lost in the employee parking lot while listening to J’s new GPS steer us wrong over and over again. We finally made it to the right place, parked in BFE, and schlepped our way in – still managing to forget half the things I’d brought (snacks, clothing, etc) for Ava. J was overcome with excitement as soon as he got a glimpse of the entryway. And the first picture he took in the park?
Was of the store. I kid you not.
There were lots of legos in the store. (Shocking, I know.) I’m certain we looked at every single one of them.
Ava was quite taken with the elephant
until it did this
at which point she flipped out. Screaming loudly and doing her level best to get out of the park – stat. Apparently having legos come to life wasn’t in her list of fun things to do today.
J calmed her down with a lego safari.
Whatever he said must have worked wonders. Maybe he told her she could shoot them…I dunno.
Just so y’all know – we were there for a long time. All day – which means there are lots and lots of pictures.
She lovedlovedlovedloved the little kids’ play area. There was a train which I wedged myself in to…
and honestly, she was way happier about it than she looked in this picture. She was all OMGOMGOMG a train – waving wildly at J on each circle ’round the track. I was all OMGOMGOMG because there were vegetables made of legos everywhere.
And she was in heaven with the playground area – liberally scattered with legos, of course. Except she couldn’t be happy with the billion and two lying around everywhere and instead started sneakily disassembling a fireman when she thought we weren’t looking. We rescued part of his hand from her pocket shortly after this photo was taken.
There was also a maze
which I had to lure her out of with the promise of carrying (and using) Mama’s chapstick.
We moved on to the Sky Cruiser ride which is like a giant lego car atop a track above the park. This is one of the more popular rides so we hurried over to get in line and wait. And wait we did. I stuck it out in line while J took Ava over to the adjacent lego play area strategically placed by most rides so parents can wait and kids can play. Great idea in theory but, according to J, not so much in reality since it was full of unsupervised brats who kept stealing each others legos.
Hence the evil eye in these photos:
All the while I’m waiting in the super long line – and thinking that for sure the kid in front of me was too little and betting he wouldn’t be allowed on the ride. So guess who was actually too short and was denied access to the Sky Cruiser? Yeah, that would be us. Well, specifically it would be little miss 35.5 inches who needed to be 36 inches. I was livid, by the way. We’d had her measured at the first ride and they said she was good to go for the 36 inch rides and it was mighty annoying to know you’d just waited for over an hour only to be turned away. I think it was at this point that I began to hate legoland – if only for a brief moment.
More dirty looks from J when Ava would get tired of waiting in line:
She toughed it out, though. And then she rode almost every thing that they would let her on.
Oh boy, guess what we found? More legos, Yay. <– insert sarcasm here
Ava, thankfully, was so bored and tired that she slept through this whole part of the park. I could have. For me, it was nifty for about 3 minutes. For J, I think he could have moved in and lived there forever – he loved it that much.
Although J did meet someone famous.
I do realize this is getting long and tedious so I’ll sum it up.
Legos. Everywhere.
And then Ava talked us into yet another expensive souvenir and our day came to a timely end when she was eaten by a shark. The End.
Okay, not quite the end.
We had some time to kill after the park closed since our flight didn’t depart until 11PM so we drove around a cool little island we unexpectedly discovered, found a park to let Ava play in, met some really nice people, and watched our last San Diego sunset.
The End. (For real, this time.)