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California Coaster Kings’ Lego Adventure – Legoland California

Sean: A park less covered by us, yet incredibly popular, is Legoland California! We had the chance to visit Legoland California and accompanying Sea Life to check out some of their adorable European coasters, Ninjago, and of course a ton of Legos. Join me as I talk about all there is to do at this adorable place!

– Over the years, many of our images have popped up on other sites and forums, awesome that our coverage spreads, not so awesome that not everyone mentioned where they got the images from. We are totally fine with our audience using our images, BUT ONLY IF credit is given to californiacoasterkings.com. Thank you! –

With a lego brick globe welcoming guests that come from the parking lot, the entrance to the resort is nicely laid out. 

On the left we’ll find construction of the new Legoland Castle Hotel. Which is slated to open in 2018.  

There was a lot of construction going on at the time of our visit. Within a year a full fetched resort hotel will occupy this land.

BUT HERE WE ARE! LEGOLAND CALIFORNIA! Which has one of the nicest entrances around. A bit basic, but colorful. Sometimes less is more. 

Time to check out the park, California Coaster Kings style! (Getting very excited over adorable rides and well-operated coasters). 

First impression when you come in is an instant indicator of how well maintained and clean the park is. And there’s Legos everywhere, of course! 

Okay we couldn’t wait to check out this little (amazingly themed/landscaped) Gerstlauer Dragenjagd!

Coastersaurus exists of roomy trains, the biggest you’ll ever find on a kiddie coaster, and a fun short layout. The ride starts with a decently intense drop, especially in the back row. It’s followed by a helix and a quick set of swings before a final turn into the brake run. It’s not big but for a kiddie coaster it was incredibly fun!

On the other side of the park we passed Ninjago on our way to Technic Coaster. We’ll check out this awesome new 2016 Triotech interactive dark ride later on!

As you’d expect from Legoland, there’s lego creations everywhere. 🙂

Bathroom signs are amazingly on point! Little hidden highlight of our day was just seeing this bathroom sign. 

The park features plenty of unique rides that have proven to be popular at the resort and later elsewhere in the world, including Aquazone Wave Racer!

Legoland’s ‘twist’ on the classic teacups attraction is the Bionicle Blaster! The ride is surrounded by several impressive looking Bionicle figures. 

BUT NOW TIME FOR TECHNIC COASTER! The park’s 2001 Mack Wild Mouse coaster! 

The ride’s restraints are much more comfortable than the current Coast Rider restraints. Something we were very thankful for! The ride vehicles look absolutely amazing and are one of our favorite looking wild mouse trains out there. 

The ride itself rides like most other large wild mouse coasters, a bit too trimmed for my liking, but the ride’s color scheme and lift-hill theming are incredible. In addition to which the ride is beautifully situated between trees and other foliage. The ride’s the most thrilling coaster at the park, a park we think could use another thrilling family coaster 🙂

The next area of the park was the Egyptian themed area with an indoor play ground as well as some kiddie flat rides and a dark ride. The classic Sally shooter Lost Kingdom Adventure is an adorable old school shooter with black light painting. I actually really enjoyed the ride, despite of what I had heard prior to riding. 

Little shout out to ACE here 😛

NEXT COASTER: DRAGON! A very fun custom Vekoma Junior Coaster with an amazing dark ride pre-lift!

The station is inside the castle. Once the train departs it rolls through several castle themed scenes with all-lego characters. Including a dining hall, wizard’s tower and dragon dungeon!

ALSO YOU CAN PLAY WITH LEGOS ALL OVER THE PLACE!

The ride’s layout is not necessarily impressive. Nonetheless, the pre-lift makes up for that. The coaster section features a solid helix and some fun quick transitions, ending with an airtime hill into the brake-run, back into the ride’s castle themed station. 

In the medieval themed area (Castle Hill) of the park there is an array of other attractions as well. Including the Royal Joust ride, which has kids ride on lego horse passing several lego castle hill themed elements. 

The park’s most thrilling attraction is also in the area. The robotic arm thrill ride named Knights’ Tournament features six arms and throws riders around over a pond. 

For those familiar with Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey at Universal Studios Hollywood, imagine the arm movements on that ride, but much intensified, including inversions 🙂

Another attraction in the area is The Hideaways, which is a large scale wooden playground. The park offers a good combination of attractions, from quality dark rides to roller coasters, kiddie rides and playgrounds… but there’s more to come! 

Perhaps the highlight of Castle Hill truly was the park’s infamous Granny’s Apple Fries with Vanilla Cream. It was absolutely delicious. It’s a can’t miss snack when at the park! 

On our way down the hill to the back side of the park, we passed by the park’s older golf courses. The space will be used for a 2018 attraction! 

The ducks seem to enjoy it as it stands, however.

Next area of the park is Pirate Shores. The area’s most prominent attraction is Splash Battle. This type of ride is particularly popular with families, and thus Legoland is the perfect place for one.

And as you’d expect at Legoland, the ride’s themed to a mix of lego creations and scenery that doesn’t necessarily involve legos. Highlighting the insane amount of lego bricks that are used around the park. 

Captain Cranky’s Challenge is the park’s tugboat attraction! The animatronic lego pirate that ‘powers’ the ride is one of my favorite themed elements at the park!

FOOD MADE OUT OF LEGOS. I really don’t think it can get much better than this. 

Next up is Fun Town! There’s a ton of small attractions, but it mainly serves as a scenic area with the entrances to the water parks. I didn’t find any of the rides or additional attractions to pop in this area. Nonetheless it’s very scenic. 

Besides the two versions of the infamous Driving School attractions, the area’s most prominent ride is the Police and Fire Academy.

The area is also home to a Duplo playground, it was crazy to see all these Duplo elements many many years after I last played with it as a young child. This park definitely has the tendency to give you major childhood flashbacks!

A CAT! We love cats! He is welcoming us to Heartlake City. 

The stage in the center of the themed area serves as the main attraction in the area, where episodes of the show are shown on the Jumbotron screen while there’s no showing of Lego Friends to the Rescue. 

The area also features several small restaurants and a water playground. 

Near the park’s Heartlake City area we find ourselves back in Explore Island (where Coastersaurus is located). We have spotted the park’s Fairy Tale Brook ride!

So if you thought that Legoland was cute and all earlier in the update, this ride should reconfirm it. This small boat ride past lego recreations of infamous fairytales is just wonderful. 

With all Disney’s involvement with fairytales, this ride would almost make you wonder if there was some sort of Lego-Disney collaboration! 

SPOT THE ROLLERS KATES!

After this awesome attraction, we decided to check out the park’s SeaLife attraction. From wherever in the world you may be reading this, you have likely been to one! We’ve been to several on different continents. The SeaLife aquarium brand is a wonderful attraction. Time to head in!

The aquarium experience is basically a giant walk-through, much like the other SeaLife’s I’ve been to. Displaying hundreds of different types of fish and sea life. 

Including touch pools, tide pools, wave pools, and a lot of aquariums that offered aerial views in addition to views from the side. 

About half way through the exhibition, there’s a jellyfish section with disco lights, demonstrating how these creatures reflect light. Pretty awesome!

SeaLife also TROLLS guests with plastic bags posing as jellyfish. All in the name of raising awareness about ocean polutants. 

The center of SeaLife is a giant tank with sharks and stingrays. You have PLENTY of opportunities to take a look through windows that are located throughout the exhibit. 

Another awesome room at SeaLife:

How do you know you’re at Legoland’s SeaLife? THERE ARE LEGO CREATIONS IN THE AQUARIUM!

There’s also a glass tunnel through this aquarium, of course. Which was very low for a 6’5” tall guy like me. Also this shot was taken as I was surprise-welcomed by a stingray! 

SeaLife is a very long exhibit that you can spend a good hour, if not longer, visiting. It’s not included with a general park ticket, but we highly advise you to add this to your ticket and check it out. It’s very educational and of course features plenty to look at!

Let’s now travel to the parks most impressive ride… NINJAGO THE RIDE!

The ride’s queue is incredibly long, but we didn’t wait a second on the empty day we were there. The queue reveals the theme and explains the story for those who are not familiar with the Ninjago brand. 

The station, unlike Knott’s Berry Farm’s Voyage to the Iron Reef boards 4 cars at once. This ride is about a million times better than Iron Reef, and is a must-ride when at the park. We were very impressed with the hand motion controlled shooting, and the incredible animation and theming. It blended together so incredibly well that at some points I had to take off my 3D glasses to figure out what was real and what was screen. The ride has a wonderful length for a dark ride, and it’s probably the best you’ve ever seen Triotech deliver. Wonderful ride!

So you know Jungle Cruise at Disneyland? LEGOLAND HAS COAST CRUISE!

Which takes you through the park’s main lagoon with a cheesy storyline, intentionally cheesy of course. 

It then passes by a lot of Miniland structures, which can only be seen on the ride! Including the Sydney Opera House. 

The Taj Mahal, which looks way better in Lego form than it does in Soarin’ Around the World. (Someone had to say it). 

And we can’t forget Mt. Rushmore, with its convenient location near Manhattan.

It was then time to check out actual Miniland USA. Where we spent quite some time. This really is the gem of the park, impressive, and exactly what Legoland is all about! Here’s Washington DC:

As it turns out, Disneyland isn’t the only park in SoCal with a detailed replica of the French Quarter. 

And we LOVE Vegas, so the Las Vegas strip section of Miniland USA got us very excited! Here’s New York New York, without the coaster unfortunately. 

MGM GRAND! 

Treasure Island!

The Venetian!

STRATOSPHERE INCLUDING RIDES!

For a second we thought LA was not represented. Which in a way it wasn’t but Legowood and the Griffith Observatory were!

And San Francisco of course, which was largely represented around the park’s Miniland USA. 

Miniland isn’t just a technical wonder — it’s also a really lovely garden in its own right. 

New is the Star Wars Miniland, which we LOVED! I am not the most Star Wars knowledgeable, but this new Miniland area was very neat!

Numerous classic Star Wars environs have been recreated in Lego from.

Of course the area’s giant Death Star lego recreation was the highlight of the exhibit.

We decided we had to come back to the Pirate Shores area of the park, despite the weather being a little cold, so we could catch a ride on the park’s Hopkins water ride, Pirate Reef!

This shoot-the-chute ride is small in stature but big on charm. And wetness!

This thing no kidding, gets you insanely soaked. But with our private boat (other people were smart enough to stay dry), and awesome Legoland pirate theming, it may have been our favorite ride of the day! 

The park also features an awesome walk through attraction, the Legoland Lego Factory Tour! With working lego-making machines, and videos illustrating what the process of making lego bricks and pieces is actually like. A very fun attraction located in the park’s Fun Town section!

Something we as international theme park and coaster nerds LOVED seeing at the Lego Factory Tour was the park maps of all other Legolands!

Let’s finish with a great looking ride! The Sky Patrol helicopter ride. The Duplo helicopters are located on poles that move out of the ground to elevate the ride vehicles. Neat attraction! 

Thank you for checking out this Legoland California report! Along with SeaWorld San Diego and Belmont Park the San Diego region has a solid line-up of family theme-parks/attractions and Legoland can not be missed when you’re planning a trip to the area!

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4 Replies to “California Coaster Kings’ Lego Adventure – Legoland California”

  1. You didn’t do the adventure walk through across from the factory tour? It’s the best part of the park. Also the park’s handmade churros with chocolate dipping sauce are the best ever. Next time check them both out!

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