Just looking for some words of wisdom / experience. We'll be at Disney in Jan with our 6, 4 and 1 y.o. For the big kids this will be their 3rd trip to Disney.
We've been contemplating a day at Legoland. Here are my thoughts:
-my kids love legos
-I've read it's geared toward younger kids. My oldest loves rides and is already getting a little impatient w/ the kiddie rides at places like Hershey & Dutch Wonderland.
-It's new to us.
But........
-it's expensive and driving there & back will take sometime
-we are Disney lovers. While I can appreciate amusement parks for what they are, I'm also very aware of how un-Disney they are
-we have more to pack in our 5 park days than normal: new Fantasyland, 1 kid who just passed 44" and another who is now over 40" opening up new rides to both of them, 4 parks (we skipped HS in the past. There's enough there for them now for us to go there,) and a toddler's schedule
A day at Legoland would only give us 4 days in Disney Parks.
Anyone who has ben to Legoland care to give input? Thanks!
We did Legoland this year, my kids are 7 and 9, both love legos - the 9 yr old is practically obsessed with them.
The good: kids had a great time, clearly the park was aimed at their age group and my daughter rode a lot of their "coasters" and decided that she was in fact brave enough to go on more rides when we got back to disney.
The bad: that same dd who was new to riding coasters, said at the end of almost every ride "that's it?" the rides really were that short, and honestly not particularly exciting (at least for me). The kids enjoyed going on them, but only asked to redo 1 ride out of all the rides in the park (and we did them ALL!)
The good: my DS loved the miniland and spent over an hour taking pictures of every little detail there for some book he wants to create at home.
The bad: DD thought miniland was cool, but did NOT want to spend an hour there!
The good: park was very empty and there was hardly anyone ahead of us in any lines
The bad: the employees are not Disney CM and they are not good at efficiently loading people onto rides, it was comical how many times I had to watch one of their coasters leave only half full because they couldn't manage to get it loaded properly or quickly with only 2 workers staffing it.
The good: A
lego friends character was meeting (one that shares the same name as my DD) and she ended up talking to my DD for a very long time because no one else was around.
The bad: we were one of 2 families in one of their restaurants and DD dropped her chicken nuggets immediately after getting them and all of the workers milling around pretended not to notice - this place was cafeteria style and she was trying to put them on her tray when she dropped them. I picked them up and finally got a worker to acknowledge me and asked what I should do with them and also for another order. He acted very put upon and took the dropped ones back and set them on the counter and then told us we would have to wait while another batch finished cooking. My DD went on a little crying jag and all the workers made a huge point of staying far away from us, and when the chicken finished cooking the worker put more on a plate, set them on top of the glass partition thing and walked away without saying anything to us. I can only imagine it would have been handled very differently at Disney.
The good: we used the buy 1 get 1 free coupon, which helped with the cost. At that price it was ok, but I would have felt very overcharged if we paid full price.
The good: We did everything the kids wanted. We were there for rope drop and were completely finished doing everything by around 3:30. We asked the kids if they wanted to reride things or go back and swim and they chose the pool.
The drive - good or bad depends on you. It was very easy and about 45 minutes and we liked seeing a little bit of the country so we liked it.
We had 6 full park days, so spending 1 of them on legoland was fun for us, but I can't imagine doing it again, unless there was a very very good sale on tickets.
