We just got back from our semi-regular 4th of July trips south of the Los Angeles area. This year, we spent it in Legoland on July 5th, and for the first time, we visited the Legoland Water Park, including the new Chima Water Park, on July 4th.
Actually, it was our first visit to a water park of any sort. Sure, we enjoy beach trips to, say, Hawaii or Cancún and stays at nice resorts with fancy swimming pools and such, but water parks are definitely a new thing for us.
We drove down to Carlsbad after the boys’ piano lessons on Thursday night, staying at the Sheraton Carlsbad overnight, and we went to Legoland at 10 AM, making a beeline to the water park and snagging a bunch of lounge chairs to avoid renting a cabana. We relaxed a bit, wandered about. The boys tried out the wave pool and one of the water slides. They tried out the Chima play structure and water slides. We had some lunch. We all drifted in the lazy river for a few laps.
Like Legoland itself, the water park skews pretty young, so we expected it to appeal more to J than to W. To his credit, W enjoys things simply because he’s open to enjoying lots of things, though, but if given the choice, he’ll go for more age-appropriate stuff.
Surprisingly, despite his insistence that he liked being there, J really didn’t seem to enjoy being at the Legoland Water Park — either the regular water park or the Chima water park. He spent most of the afternoon sitting in front of one of the big television screens, watching episodes of the Lego Chima TV series. It seems that he was — reasonably — turned off by the huge July 4th crowds, and he was also a little scared of the water slides. Eventually, the crowds died down in the late afternoon, and he joined us on some more water slides
Afterward, we returned to the Sheraton resort to wash up, have dinner, and go back to Legoland to watch the fireworks.
On Saturday, we returned to Legoland for our visit to the regular park. The highlight of this visit was, in my opinion, our visit to the Lego Movie Experience. The Lego Movie is mostly CGI, but the basement scenes with the live actors involve real, physical Lego models, and these have all be transplanted from the Warner Brothers studio fully assembled to Legoland California, reproducing the movie set (though much of it is behind plexiglass). So it was very fun to wander around the set and look at everything in detail.