Went to Legoland today. It’s probably ok if you’ve got really young kids who don’t get out much.

First of all, I’d like to point out that even if the sculptures are really good, they’re just made of Lego. I realise that a fair amount of skill and effort goes into creating these, but it’s kind of wasted, as you get over it pretty quickly.

Second, I’m really annoyed when you pay a fair stack of money to get into the park in the first place, and then they try and charge you extra for some of the attractions. Okay, they were pretty cheap, but also pretty crappy, and that just makes it worse! Why should I have to pay an extra dollar for two minutes to driving a remote controlled boat on a lake?

Right, that’s out of the way!

Pretty much everything here is designed with little kids in mind. There was only one ride that Campbell couldn’t do at all, which was the Volvo Driving School. Yes, I think it’s a contradiction, too. The rule on this one was you had to be over six, and Campbell is too honest to lie when asked her age (dammit!). They did have a Volvo Junior Driving School, but it was really lame.

Come to think of it, we used the word "lame" quite a lot.

One thing that was lame, was out of all the lame rides, there was only one that they would let Campbell on by herself. This meant that we had to squeeze onto all these lame kids rides so she could have a go. Mind you, it didn’t get a lot better: Campbell walked off the Lego Technic Test Track rollercoaster, and her first words were, "That was boring!" You get the idea.

One thing that could have been fun was the Knights Tournament, which is a essentially an industrial robot, with a chair on the end. You’re strapped in, select how intense you want the ride (on a scale of one to five), and away you go. But they ruined it. They let her on, but only on level one, which was seriously lame. Round a couple of times, tilt a bit, oh, we’re finished. I had another go without her on level five, which was a lot more fun. No real rush out of it though.

I’ve seen a thing on TV about a version of the same robot, but instead of just having a chair on the end it has a little booth thing, and they project a film. Turns it into one of those VR rides, but would be a lot more intense due to having three axis of movement. That would be fun!

So, a whole heap of lame rides for little kids. Imagine our surprise when we tried to get into one of the "Let’s build things with Lego" bits, and got turned away because Campbell was too young! Okay, so it was the Mindstorms robotics stuff, but that’s the only interesting stuff anyway.

We did find one thing that was quite nice: In keeping with the local tradition of deep frying everything you can get your hands on, we find Granny Fries. These are chips cut from a Granny Smith apple, deep fried, dusted with cinnamon sugar and served with a vanilla cream. Quite yummy, and a great way of turning something healthy into something that could kill you.

Overall, we really weren’t super happy with Legoland. There were a couple of nice touches, like the little play areas in each ride queue (filled with Lego, imagine that!), but for the most part it really was pretty boring.