We were in Florida for the holiday, and I spent a day with Guppy at Legoland Florida. It’s a lot of fun, although there are a few things that I didn’t love about it. Overall, I give it 4/5 stars.
So let’s start with the basics. Legoland Florida is a relatively new park – it just opened in 2011. It’s in Winter Haven, Florida (I’ve never heard of it either) so it’s a bit of a drive from Disney/Universal. It does have its own hotel though, as well as shared admission packages with the Orlando Aquarium and some other parks. A one-day ticket at the park is around $100 depending on whether the water park is open or not, but if you purchase before you go, it’s cheaper. There are also discounts available.
It has a good number of rides, including at least 3 roller coasters (we went on none of them). The entire park is (obviously) Lego-themed, and most of the rides look like they are built out of lego blocks.
So let’s talk about the rides for a minute. They have some really fun rides – including a kid’s driving course that lets them drive cars around a small neighborhood. Guppy loved this. Along the same lines, there is a boat ride that gives the riders complete control – while you follow a course, you steer however you want (and if you want to go in circles for an hour, you probably could). There is a horse-riding ride, an interactive shooting ride (where you shoot lasers at targets while you go through the ride – I had to convince Guppy that no, she would not accidentally get shot by a laser during this ride). There are also a few play areas with slides and other assorted playground-like activities.
One of the very neat things about the park is waiting on the lines. For some rides (not all), there are small kid-waiting areas that attach to the line. It lets kids wait there while the parents wait on the line itself. In these kid areas are duplo blocks for the kids to build things. This keeps them distracted and off of electronics.
I also really liked that there are a few building activities. Guppy and I built monsters, as well as a racecar. Because there are so many pieces available, we could try a few different configurations (all of which seemed to break). The cars in particular encouraged kids to try different ways to build up speed and get distance on the jumps. What worked and what didn’t would make for interesting conversations, if Guppy hadn’t fallen asleep in the car.
One thing that was absolutely amazing was the minicity displays. From Vegas to New York, to Tatooine, there were amazing builds of different cities with moving parts and great details (such as the concert playing in the mini Hollywood Bowl). There was also a scavenger hunts, where you had to find all of the mini Santas in each city, but we didn’t find out about it until it was too late.
The two biggest negatives for me were the food and the shows. We had trouble finding food options (although we found some later) but most of them were burgers. I would like to see more variety. We only got to see one show – this is my second complaint. From what I could tell, all of the shows ended at 4pm. Since the park was open until 8, that didn’t make a lot of sense.
Overall, Legoland is well worth a day trip.
Don’t miss: Driving academy,
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