Legoland

We took the kids to Legoland today. They first heard about it during the flight from KL from the steward who was chatting with them and had told them that it is a fun place to visit. In fact, a couple of weeks before we came, a friend who had been there on holidays had told us about it too. The kids have been hinting and pestering us about it since. We have to admit that we didn't know much about it; even considering that Malaysia is planning to have one soon in Johor. Of course we know what Lego is but the actual offerings of Legoland as a family holiday destination had never been clear to us.


Yesterday, after a quick discussion we decided that it is not such a bad idea to go there today. A quick check on their website ended up with us purchasing the tickets over the internet (with 10% discount). Considering our plan for the next 12 months, we decided to go for the Merlin Annual Family passes. The Merlin Annual Pass allows 12 months unlimited entry a number of the UK's top attractions such as Legoland, Alton Towers, London Aquarium, Madame Tussauds, London and Sea Life. The online purchase was quite fast and straightforward. After the purchase, the tickets are emailed to the email address provided for printing and softcopy of the annual pass application form is also provided for completion prior to getting there.

Legoland is in Windsor (less than 40km from London) and it took us about 45 mins to get there by car. Once we get there, with the printed tickets, it's just a simple scanning of the barcodes on the tickets for us to get in. From there, we headed to the Annual Pass Centre for our photographs to be taken and the actual passes to be issued. We figured that these are the places that we would like to bring the kids to anyhow, thus it makes sense for us to get the passes.


Legoland is basically a theme-park with rides, shows and rides...and rides.... What makes Legoland special is the focus on Lego. A lot of life-size figures in the park are made of Lego blocks. Yup, the tiny blocks. Thousand and thousands of them. In fact, after a while, whenever you see something, you start to wonder if it's made from Lego, including live birds. There a nice scene of white geese chasing a man who was carrying a goose in his arm. All of them, these geese and the man are made of tiny Lego blocks. There are also Lego dinosaurs, giraffes, elephants and a lot more representatives from the animal kingdom.


Some of the more famous things made of Lego that are there are the portrait of the Queen, the Wembley Stadium, the Tower Bridge, the Big Ben and the London Eye. Also not forgetting, the giraffe and the dinosaur - you have to ask the kids if you are wondering why they are famous too.


























Apart from these, the rides are the main draw to Legoland. Various types of rides are available and one of the first things we notices was that quite a lot of people came with ponchos, rain-coats or generally waterproof jackets. Our initial deduction that these were due to the not so great weather (it was drizzling at times) was soon replaced by the realisation that you will get wet in quite a lot of the rides. As with most theme-parks, the queue for rides can get irritatingly long and we ended up skipping some of them mainly because we had planned to leave by 3pm.

All in all, we ended up going on the Viking's Longboat Invader, the Dragon ride, the Aero Nomad, the Laser Raiders and the Dino Safari. These would probably represent less than a quarter of the rides available but we prefer stress-free walks instead of spending most of the time in queues.

We also managed to get ourselves lost in the Loki's Labyrinth and finally caught the Revenge of the Aztec Queen show which was quite entertaining especially for the kids.

We had lunch at the City Walk within the Lego City area. Lunch comprised 3 Margherita Pizza, a vegetable pasta in tomato sauce (both suitable for vegetarian) and 3 slices of garlic bread. The food with a bottle of mineral water & a bottle of Oasis costed us GBP24 (original price was GBP30 but with the annual pass, we got a 20% discount). One interesting thing about Legoland and food is, unlike some other theme parks (e.g. Hong Kong Disneyland, where you cannot bring in even bottled water), you are free to bring in food and drinks. There were a lot of families having picnics with home-made sandwiches and finger foods. That would be the way to do it for us too in future visits, insha-Allah.

The park is opened from 10am to 5pm but with Asr being at 5.10pm, we decided to simply return back home for it instead of offering it there. This is also partly because we can always go back for free with the annual passes. With perfect timing, we left at 3pm and was back at Monarch House by 4pm.