We did our summer vacation to California in two parts. The first was to LEGOLAND and the second was just to spend time on the beach and just relax.

LEGOLAND California (June 24, 2018-June 27, 2018)

Our first stop was LEGOLAND California. We stayed in the LEGOLAND Hotel that’s right on the property. They had just opened a new hotel there that looks like a castle but we opted to stay in the original hotel.

I joked with Matthew and Lorelei saying that the hotel had better be made out of Legos or we weren’t staying there. The hotel is painted to look like it’s made out of Legos with brightly-colored sections but, of course, it’s not made out of Legos. However, they do have Lego sculptures throughout the hotel that are made out of the bricks including a dragon that greeted us at the entrance.

We arrived at the hotel right around check-in time but there were already several people in line waiting. Of course, after about six hours of driving Matthew and Lorelei were pretty anxious to explore and play not sit some more. Fortunately the hotel has a big Lego pit in the lobby for kids to play in. In addition there is a scavenger hunt for them to do where the answers they get are used to unlock a “treasure chest” that’s in the room. The kids went off and did the scavenger hunt while I waited in line to check-in.

Once it was my turn I was told that the room wasn’t ready yet (which was disappointing since we were there after the designated check-in time) but that they would send me a text message when it was. By the time it was my turn to check-in the kids had already finished the scavenger hunt so we sat in the lobby waiting for a text message. After waiting an hour with no text message I went up to the reception desk again to see what was going on only to find out that our room was finally ready.

We made our way to the elevator only to come upon one of the most popular attractions of the hotel: the corner with the whoopee cushion built in to the floor. It’s clearly marked on the carpet to avoid embarrassing anyone and you have to go out of your way to trigger it. It’s basically a pressure sensor under the carpet hooked up to a speaker in the wall. Of course it makes all kinds of different fart noises along with some interspersed commentary from the lego character painted on the wall. Every time we went to the elevator someone was stomping on that thing.

When making the reservation I picked the “adventure” themed room. They also have Ninjago (which I guess was a movie or cartoon series but I have never heard of it before), princess, medieval and adolescent girl themes. The adventure themed room was decorated like an Indiana Jones movie. Keeping with the Lego theme, there were several lego models in the room: we had a bug on the bathroom door, a parrot looking over the bedroom and a scorpion in the bathroom. A sign in the room says that the Lego models are not to be removed from the room or you could be charged up to $900 to replace them if they were taken or damaged in some way.

Inside the room is the “treasure chest” that has a combination lock on it. The combination is four-digit answer they got from the scavenger hunt around the lobby of the hotel. The kids must have gotten the correct answer because the treasure chest did open and there were bags of Lego kits inside.

The room is laid out well for kids staying with their parents. The kids had their own section of the room for sleeping with bunk beds (with their own controllable lights) and their own television. The adult bed was just like any other hotel bed.

Our room was on the third floor and overlooked the main entrance to the theme park.

There was a refrigerator in the room and we typically make use of such things because we like to bring our own drinks and water bottles. However the refrigerator seemed like it was just a couple of degrees blow the room temperature. I notified the front desk and they sent someone to look at it pretty quickly but the technician said that the refrigerator is operating as expected. They did offer to bring up a bigger refrigerator, which I accepted and it did cool much better. I was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t tack on an additional fee for the refrigerator for the duration of our stay.

There are a couple of restaurants right in the original hotel (we didn’t wander over to the castle hotel to see what restaurants they offered). One was buffet style (Bricks Family Restaurant) and the other was traditional sit-down style. We tried the buffet place for dinner the first night and were kind of shocked at the nearly $100 bill (with gratuity) for the four of us. Since it was buffet it was all-you-can-eat but it’s enough of a challenge getting Matthew and Lorelei to eat new things that they weren’t really excited about anything the buffet offered. So we didn’t go back there for dinner the rest of our stay. Breakfast was free there every morning though.

As hotel guests we got 30-minute early access to some portions of the park and we took advantage of that in the two full days that we were there. Our strategy was to use the LEGOLAND mobile application to figure out the ride wait times to figure out which ones ended up with the longest wait times and go to those when they were open for hotel guests only.

So the very first ride we went to was Coastersaurus, a small roller coaster. Matthew and Lorelei weren’t big fans. It wasn’t a crazy roller coaster. It didn’t go very fast or go upside down but just when they thought the ride was over the operator let it do it again (maybe because it was early in the morning with a pretty small line because it wasn’t open to the general public yet). Needless to say we didn’t return to that ride.

One of the kids’ favorite rides was the Driving School. They got to drive their own electric cars on a mock-up of city streets complete with roads with painted lane lines and street lights. Both Matthew and Lorelei did pretty well with that. Many kids ended up in mini-pileups that the ride operators had to untangle but Matthew and Lorelei stayed away from those. Matthew did try to run another kid off the road but it was mostly the other kid’s fault.

Of course it being LEGOLAND meant that there were numerous models made out of Legos and all of them were quite impressive. There were Lego representations of San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, London, India and many other places. They also had many different Star Wars Lego models. I was debating if they were solid Legos or if they were a Lego facade built around some kind of interior structure. On a boat ride that went around to some of the larger structures the tour guide was giving counts of how many Legos each model was and they were all around 100,000 so that pretty much implies that they are solid Legos. All of the models were very impressive and detailed.

There’s also a waterpark there. We spent about half a day there but you could easily spend at least an entire day in there alone. The kids really liked the large wave pool they had. Matthew really liked the lazy river because he made me go around with him about eight times. Karen and I both went down a waterslide with each of the kids.

There are lots of little stores around the park (I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination as to what they sell). One of the nice things is that they all seemed to have bins with Legos in them that the kids were free to build with while you were in the store.

We spent two full days at LEGOLAND and felt like we did everything there was to see. We certainly didn’t do all of the rides (there were other rollercoasters that we absolutely knew that Matthew and Lorelei wouldn’t do after the Coastersaurus ride).

I don’t think LEGOLAND has the age reach of other theme parks like Disneyland. Probably once the kids hit 10 years old, LEGOLAND will lose its appeal to them but at least at their current age they definitely want to go back again someday.

Shelter Island, San Diego, California (June 27, 2018-June 30, 2018)

After LEGOLAND we drove a few miles to Shelter Island to just relax and find some beaches as Matthew and Lorelei had never seen the ocean before.

Before getting to Shelter Island, we drove to the coast so that Matthew and Lorelei can experience the ocean for the first time. La Jolla is where we decided to stop. La Jolla is a very popular place with popular beaches and so finding parking was a challenge

We stayed at the Best Western Island Palms Hotel & Marina. I opted for the marina view room. I read somewhere that the Shelter Island Marina was a deep-water marina making it one of the few places where really large yachts can moor.

Shelter Island was nice because it had its own little beach and a playground within walking distance of the hotel. Shelter Island isn’t that big so it’s easy to walk the entire island from end to end. It’s only a few hundred feet wide and maybe a mile long. The island consists of mainly hotels and resorts. Most of the hotel/resorts had their own marinas (ours included) but all of them had a keypad so people can’t just wander out on the docks among the yachts.

This part of our vacation wasn’t as hectic as LEGOLAND. We didn’t really have any set schedule of things we had to do. One of the things I always wanted to see in San Diego was the USS Midway Museum since Karen and I were in San Diego back in 2008.

We showed up only about an hour before the USS Midway Museum closed one day. The person at the ticket window said that one hour isn’t sufficient to tour the entire aircraft carrier but that we could still purchase the tickets that day, wander around the museum for an hour and then come back the next day at no charge. With our hour we mostly wandered around the flight deck and the hangar below and looked at the numerous aircraft they have on display (mostly Vietnam War and Korean War era aircraft).

The next day we went back and did the full self-guided tour. Depending on how long you take in the individual compartments, the self-guided tour can take up to three hours. We went through sleeping quarters for both the enlisted personnel as well as the officers’ quarters/mess, the mess area/kitchen, communications/control (Matthew really liked this area because you could push the buttons on the equipment as well as them having a window in the floor showing all of the wiring running around), ready rooms for both aircraft and helicopters, brig, engine room and the forecastle (that’s where they keep the really big anchors attached to really big chains to hold them). There was also a tour of the bridge but it was a guided tour because of the limited space and there probably would have been a wait. It would have been interesting to see though.

Another day we went to Balboa Park. We didn’t really visit many of the buildings but we did visit the Botanical Building and Lily Pond. We just walked around the park after that. They have an extensive collection of different varieties of roses.

After our time at Shelter Island we headed back home. San Diego is only about a six-hour drive from our home so not too long of a drive after spending about a week in San Diego.