If you're looking for advice on spending an entire day at Legoland, I'm not the person to ask. My family and I have memberships, and we typically visit for only two and a half to three hours since it's just a 45-minute drive for us. If we stay longer on weekdays, we hit traffic, the kids get grumpy, and our youngest tends to throw tantrums, which isn't much fun.
However, if you're interested in seeing some cool attractions and fun activities for kids at Legoland California, stick around for the rest of this post and check out the pictures showcasing what's happening at Legoland California.
From the minute you walk in, you're bombarded by Legos and Duplos everywhere, with Lego sculptures galore. For the few who don’t know, I hate to burst your bubble, but a lot of these masterpieces aren't 100% Lego. Many of them have steel frames to keep them from crumbling under their own awesomeness (weight). Yep, I was pretty bummed when I found that out too!
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My kids were super excited because the front section of Legoland was being remodeled for a dinosaur theme. They both love dinosaurs, even though, as I mentioned in a previous post, we once took them to a museum full of dinosaur exhibits, and they lost interest in about five seconds. But oh well! Here, with the Lego statues, they were totally captivated. In fact, we had a hard time pulling them away from the statues to get ready for the rides!
Honestly, as long as we were having fun, I was totally fine with it. I wasn’t too pumped to stand in line for the new rides at the front anyway. They were extra busy, especially since summer is wrapping up for many students in the San Diego area. I go back to work as a teacher on the 19th, and my students start back on the 24th, so this was a great way to enjoy our time before school starts again.
On top of being super into dinosaurs, my kids are also really into cars, which usually means crashing them into my feet, running them over my toes, and maybe even dropping them on my head (just kidding—kind of). They love playing with anything on wheels, from Hot Wheels to big dump trucks. So, we usually make a beeline past the front section of Legoland, skip the kiddie playground, and head straight to the Lego cars to let them drive before it gets too crowded.
My three-year-old just started getting the hang of driving these cars, so he’s having a blast—even if he forgets to push the pedal and crashes into the wall a lot! Meanwhile, my older one can drive the smaller track with his eyes closed and has recently started driving on the bigger course, waving at everyone and having a great time.
Our next stop is always the Lego helicopters. I’m not entirely sure why they find this ride so much fun. Maybe it’s just part of our routine by now, but we end up riding it at least twice every time we visit!
After we wrapped up the helicopter rides, we headed over to the Lego City Deep Sea Adventure. On this ride, you usually sit with another family of four or a group, with seats on the left and right sides of the submarine. The goal is to keep your eyes peeled and try to find all the treasure scattered at the bottom of the sea after a shipwreck.
Despite riding this children’s attraction over ten times, I’ve never actually found all the treasure. Wait... I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that.
Most of my pictures on this ride came out pretty blurry. I didn’t want to use a flash in such a small space, so I was trying to shoot through the glass, which already had a reflection, while we were moving in low light. This resulted in a bunch of blurry pictures, and the ones below are the only ones that came out somewhat okay.
And it's not like a flash would have done anything except give me a nice glare.
Now, this is where my biggest photo dump is about to occur! It’s Mini Land USA at Legoland California, and my kids spend way too much time here. There are so many buttons for them to push, which either make sounds, move the vehicles, make the boats move, or make the Lego characters dance or sing. They’ll sit there mashing those buttons for two to three minutes each, and there are tons of them! We definitely spend way too much time in this area.
But I have to admit, this area is also pretty cool. It features local landmarks built out of Legos, along with other places like San Francisco and Las Vegas. It’s really fun to walk through and see how big these models are and what you can do with Legos—if you know what you’re doing!
Honestly, I left out a lot of photos because we’d spend too much time here if I didn’t. Technically, the last two aren’t a part of Miniland. You could see them from the boat, but they’re really close to Miniland.
After this, we quickly ran by the build a boat area where you can build your own boat and put it on the river and watch it float. However, it seems like half the time the boat gets stuck, and you have to reach over and give it a nudge to get it moving again. It’s pretty cool for the kids (and adults!) to build their own boats and set them on the water. My boy loves to race them, so it usually turns into a competition to see who can dislodge their boat first!
By this point, we were already two hours into our trip to Legoland. Honestly, my kids didn’t have much for breakfast. My oldest boy and I went out to pick up trash at 6:30 in the morning before we got ready to go, which I’ll talk about in another post later on. My youngest boy woke up at 8:30, which is kind of late for him, so we rushed to get everything packed, threw it in the car, and started driving, without even having breakfast ourselves! While the kids had a few snacks at the park, we knew that if we didn’t get them some real food soon, we were going to have a terrible time trying to get them to eat.
But of course, that didn’t stop them from trying to stay at the park, insisting they weren’t hungry and wanting to stop by Duplo Playtime before we headed out. They really only wanted to ride the ride where you pull yourself up and let yourself drop, which, by the way, is actually kind of tiring on your arms because you have to use quite a bit of force to get the seat to go up. After that, they played with some rubber Legos for a little bit, and then we finally convinced them that it was time to go eat.
Well, thank you for joining us on that quick journey to Legoland! I wish we had had more time to spend there so I could get pictures of more of the rides and share more of what we saw with all of you, but alas, that wasn’t happening if I wanted to keep my sanity. However, if you want to see more of the park, let me know! We’re probably going back again soon to try some of the rides we didn’t get to this time because my kids were insistent on seeing everything, even though we go there all the time because we have a membership. If anyone here wants to see more of the park, I will definitely do my best to get more photos. By the way, I’m sorry the photos aren’t great—I’m usually taking them on the move while chasing my kids!