Legoland, in retrospect

Right, well, the good news is it didn't rain all day. We took the train, which is always a weird experience. The Bahn has all these annoying little rules, that basically exist to confuse you so that you can't possibly do it right, and then they can nail you for messing up and fine you outrageously. That's my theory, anyway. They have this Bavaria-ticket deal where for €24 you and four friends can go anywhere in Bavaria, but only on certain trains - the regional ones, but not the intercity ones, in a very small nutshell and of course it's really more complicated than that. So yeah, you can all go somewhere for €24, and trains depart every hour, but they don't tell you the trains you can use the €24-ticket on depart every six hours. Actually, some media-entity here went to a train station and asked five different Bahn workers the same question, and got four different answers. So see, even the staff don't know what's going on.

Anyway, in case you were wondering why we HAD to take the 9am train, and couldn't leave Legoland until 6pm, that's basically it. So we were there too long, and people got cranky and tired. And the weather was bad, but that was actually probably a good thing ultimately, because Saturday was the first day of the vacations, AND our annual passes are not valid in August (yes, of course, you knew the Legoland people were corporate bandito scum, don't pretend you didn't), so it should have been absolutely mobbed, but because of the rain, it wasn't. And the kids mostly had fun. And the lines weren't too long, though they were still long enough. And there is no line for Miniland, which Gus really, really likes, especially because of the freight train in Hamburg harbor. And I learned that using a digital camera is not nearly as easy as it looks.

And we will probably go one more time, since we bought the annual passes and all, but I think next year we might explore the possibilities of the Playmobil Fun-Park instead. CJ told me it's only €5,50 to get in (compare that to Legoland's €19 for kids, €23 for adults), so it can be like a quarter as cool as Legoand and still be worth the money. In any case, it was still fun, but Legoland really does have a sort of diminishing-returns thing about it - each time you go it's just a bit less fabulous. Not that we had a bad time, but we're starting to see how that would be possible.

Oh! But how cool is this? Gus lost his first tooth! In the line for the Racecars at the Lego Drome! Big day, and the tooth fairy gave him a whole €1.

Wow. Another kid-milestone.