Sunday, October 01, 2006
Sept 21 - A Child's Dream Come True
UPDATE: I have finally managed to get a good internet connection AND good bahaviour from Blogger so I was able to get a little more up-to-date. Enjoy and keep an eye out for more to come.
Today is the day that André-Paul has been 
waiting for since the first day of the trip. A-P is a Lego manic! I have to admit that I too have been looking forward to seeing what Legoland is all about. Unfortunately, however, it became painfully apparent after I was presented with the bill for the entrance fee, exactly what Legoland was all about. And I can honestly report that my enthusiasm for Legoland sank in direct proportion with how much my credit card debit rose that day. The first stop for the kids was an 
area where you had pretty much every piece of Lego available and you can build your own mini soapbox race car which you can then race against others on a specially built track that will time the competitors. I decided to slip out during this phase to check out “Miniland” which is an area where they have built mini replicas of many well known areas around the US using Lego. They had Washington DC and Georgetown, New York, San Francisco,
Daytona Speedway, New Orleans, NASA, Hollywood and a whole generic area that was like a little mini-town with moving trains, moving cars, moving boats, and they even had functioning ferries! After checking out all the very cool mini-land displays, I got back 
just in time to watch the races. Then it was on to the rides. We started off with a roller coaster and it was after that ride that I started to realize I should have brought the boys here about 4 years ago. Even though we had fun, the rides were a little on the lame, I mean, tame side. That is, except for “The Dragon”. This ride can possibly be best described as a huge mechanical arm protruding up from the ground where you get strapped into the 
“hand” and it decides where you go after that. Then the arm, which can pivot and bend at the “wrist” and “elbow” and can also swivel around these points, starts to through you around like a rag doll. The key to this ride is that you get to choose the level of performance 
you want to experience. The levels range from “1”, which is quite mild, up to “5” which is labelled “Extreme”. The kids tried level 4, which is labelled “Turbo”, and they loved it. I figured that since the roller coaster was lame, I should try this but to ensure I wouldn’t be bored, I chose “Extreme”. Therein lay my mistake. Being whipped up and back at the same time, resulting in you hanging upside down behind where you were just a second before, and then being swivelled out of that position and yanked 90 degrees to one side (not that I can tell which side is which at 
this point) at the same time, is not the kind of behaviour I was mentally prepared for. I believe
that “Extreme” was the proper label for this vertiginous ride and my stomach can attest to that as it was not so happy afterward. Live and learn. Check the video of the kids on this crazy ride! We spent the rest of the day moving around the park checking out the pirate ships, complete with water cannons, the Lego gocarts, sponsored by Volvo. Adults were not allowed to do this one and although the cars were not very fast, the kids seemed to have a good time. We also challenged the kids to the firefighter test. This was an activity were you got into your fire engine, then had
to pump a handle, similar to those little moving train cars, to get the fire engine to move toward the “burning” building. It wasn’t actually burning but there were 
pictures of flames in the window. You then had to jump out of the fire engine and start pumping the fire hydrant to shoot water up at the window with the flames. This also required you to aim the nozzle appropriately to get the water in the window. Once you pumped enough water in the window, you had to jump back in the fire truck and pump your way back to the beginning before the other teams. A-P and Morgan were laughing
at us saying that they were going to win easily but it turned out quite the opposite as Chantal and I completely annihilated them. Now, it is not easy to take pleasure in pulling out a win in an event like this when your adversaries are both under the age of 13 … but we managed to do it just the same! We also squeezed in a visit to the 4-D, computer generated Lego movie. You not only wore 3-D glasses to get that effect but you also experienced wind, smoke and temperature changes that were synchronized to the movie. Kind of cool. And the kids also went to Lego school to learn how to program little Lego robots to pick up and drop items automatically. It was an action packed day that was made much more enjoyable with the wonderful weather (of course!) and the virtually non-existent lines at any of the rides or games. Remind me to take my kids on vacation in September every year.
Today’s word:
vertiginous \vur-TIJ-uh-nuhs\, adjective:
1. Affected with vertigo; giddy; dizzy.
2. Causing or tending to cause dizziness.
3. Turning round; whirling; revolving.
4. Inclined to change quickly or frequently; inconstant.
