Billund (Legoland), Denmark

Billund is the home of the Lego company and the site of the first Legoland theme park. We're such fans of Lego that we had to make this slight detour to see its birthplace. The bus from Vejle deposited us not far from the main entrance, and upon walking through the gates, we were surrounded by Lego reconstructions of many of the famous sights we had already seen on our tour. Miniland, as this part of the park is named, featured not just static reproductions of landmarks, but animated layouts of whole regions. The buildings were accurate and to the proper scale, but the really amazing parts were the moving vehicles. We saw cars and buses, trucks and boats, even canals with locks and drawbridges, all in motion and perfectly synchronized.


We walked around the park and saw the other areas, like Pirateland and Castleland, but those had rides for smaller kids (not big kids like us!) and less actual Lego, so they were less of a draw for us. Instead, we took some seats in the Mindstorms Pavilion and built a walking robot-dinosaur from a set of plans that were provided, and then we improvised a motorized car. Later, we saw on display some kits for cars that had such amenities as a four-speed transmission!
Thoroughly impressed with Danish imaginative genius, we boarded the bus for a return trip to Vejle, and then a train to Fredericia.