Legoland Windsor

For months before we came to England, Jonathan had been paging through a book about Legos that friends loaned us and dreaming of visiting Legoland Windsor, a big amusement park done up by Lego corporation. Finally, on August 5th, we visited. In our rented vehicle, a Peugeot 307 that Jonathan named the Jungle Thing, we roamed the motorways, all around the London outskirts and near Heathrow, until we reached the park in Windsor.

The boys were obviously excited from the moment we got there. Alistair wasn’t big enough for some of the rides, so Jeremy took Jonathan on Pirate Falls, while I took him on a big roller coaster, the Dragon’s Lair. We all walked a maze, rode the Dragon’s Apprentice, the Dino Safari, the Dino Dipper, and the Fairy Tale boats. Jeremy waited in a long, long line to ride another coaster, while I took the boys on a fun safari train ride, past Lego statues that sometimes sprayed us with water.

Beyond the rides, we saw two shows, one comedy sketch with Brick and Click (ouch), and one Johnny Thunder adventure show full of gymnastics, high dives, and slapstick melodrama. Most memorably, the boys went to driving school, where the world’s most patient man gives 3-6 year olds instruction in steering and driving, then repeatedly has to rescue them from the curbs and pile ups they cause. Judging from our video, the Campbell kids shouldn’t get licenses until they hit 30. Afterward Alistair told me “I made lots of stakes, Mommy.”

We rounded out the day with a hasty trip through the amazing minature village, where whole cities are reproduced. The boys were tiring rapidly, so we only saw some of Italy, Holland, a race track, NASA, and Sweden, where Abba was performing. Afterward, we hopped back in the Jungle Thing for the ride back to Cambridge. The kids were asleep before we finished the short drive out of Windsor.

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