Trip to LEGOLAND
Last week, April 16-20, my family and I did an Easter holiday trip to LEGOLAND in Billund, Denmark. The kids had never been on a plane and Denmark is not too far away from Finland, so it was an easy start, plus LEGO bricks are close to our hearts, so it was a good match of new experiences.
Getting to Billund
Our itinerary was such that first we flew from Helsinki to Copenhagen with Finnair. Their staff was very helpful already at the ground so we even got the baby pram onto the plane easily, a phase that I had been mildly nervous about beforehand. Even the security check went fine with me having the toddler in a front-carrier, although the 4yo was assigned to a random extra pat-down, which he bravely endured like he endures, say, a visit to the dentist.
At the Copenhagen airport we had lunch at Burger King, for which we had reserved plenty of time before the next leg, which was a ~2.5 hour train trip to Vejle. (At this early stage of the season Finnair does not have direct flights to Billund.) There was a little hiccup with the train tickets and the pram, as it’s free to take the pram into the ICL trains there but you still need to reserve a spot for them. For some reason the booking system did not do the reservation – I still don’t know if I did something wrong or if the system malfunctioned – so I ended up having to call their phone service, where they were luckily able to add the pram spot reservation. The train itself, once we got there, was quiet and comfortable.
At Vejle we had a quick transfer to a local bus 43. The ride took about 30 minutes and the bus dropped us right next to LEGOLAND and its hotels.
In Billund
Hotel LEGOLAND
We had reserved something called a Kingdom Room, themed after the LEGO Castle subtheme, so naturally we headed for the big hotel building that looked like a castle. It turned out, however, that that hotel was called LEGOLAND Castle Hotel, and our reservation was next door in Hotel LEGOLAND. Confusing.
Hotel LEGOLAND looked from the outside like it was built in the 1970s, with the telltale floor tiles and a Functionalist-style porte-cochère. Indeed, checking from the Danish Wikipedia, it was established in 1968 as Esso Motor Hotel! The LEGO-themed hallways also seemed endless, but the slightly negative first impression turned better the next day after some rest and recovery.
In the hotel the kids had little gifts waiting for them in the room, and even the baby got his first Duplo set of about five pieces. The room also had a box of random LEGO bricks to build with, however it was pretty cramped all in all so there wasn’t a good space to build, especially if you wanted to shield your creations from your little brother.
LEGO House
The next day we headed for the LEGO House, “Home of the Brick” that was opened in 2017 a short 15-20 min walk away from the hotel. The LEGO House contains many activities, LEGO creations, building opportunities, a small library, some restaurants, a shop (with an underwhelming pick-a-brick section), and a floor about the history of the company and the bricks. You could easily spend an entire day there, and we basically did. We later overheard some other tourists talking during dinner about how they visited both the LEGO House and LEGOLAND during the same day, but that seems mental madness to me.
One highlight in the LEGO House is an actual brick moulding machine that constantly pushes out new 2x4 bricks. You can follow its working through transparent panels, and it even wraps the bricks in packaging. The 1yo found this device hilarious: he could’ve watched all day when the freshly minted bags of bricks fell down the conveyor belt. 😁 Every guest was welcome to take one bag of six bricks as a souvenir and it was accompanied by a personal, unique instruction on what to build with them. See, six bricks 2x4 LEGO bricks of the same color can be connected in 915,103,765 different ways, and there’s some algorithm that assigns each guest one of them.
After the LEGO House we visited the roof of the building for a virtual geocache. The building even has activities on top of it in the form of various small playgrounds. The views could’ve been nice on a sunny day, but that wasn’t one of those days, so we quickly continued back to the hotel where the kids chased each other around a big castle-like jungle gym.
Lalandia
Next, we headed to Lalandia for dinner. Lalandia is a “tropical holiday centre” some ten minutes walk away from the LEGOLAND hotels, opposite direction of the LEGO House, and it’s pretty crazy! When you enter it, it’s like one of those movie magic moments when you go into a room that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. Outside, Lalandia looks like a large, boring grey cube, but on the inside there’s a realistic (but fake) blue sky with white clouds, and it’s like you’re in some Mediterranean town all of a sudden. There are restaurants, a bowling alley, shops, and even a water park. Just wow!
LEGOLAND
The next day was Friday, and that was the LEGOLAND day. Hotel LEGOLAND, it turns out, has a direct secret passage to LEGOLAND, but we walked across the street outside, only discovering the inside route later on our way back. Anyway, there were many people queuing into the park, but the line went really fast as people just got their pre-bought tickets scanned. No wristbands were issued either, unlike in the LEGO House.
LEGOLAND starts with the Miniland: cities around the world built (mostly) in 1:20 scale. There’s also the modest 36 meters tall LEGOTOP observation tower attraction, but when you look at Miniland from up there it’s equivalent to looking at real buildings from the altitude of 720 meters! And when I said “mostly”, I mean to exclude for example the Burj Khalifa, which, if built to scale, would have needed to be some 40 meters tall, whereas now it’s there as an “only” 5.5 meters tall LEGO structure.
As for the rides the 4 and 8 year olds found the blue “high-speed merry-go-round” Caterpillar the best. There was also a pirate ship shaped jungle gym that was a hit, and The Dragon roller-coaster, which had a bit longer queue. Next to the haunted house was a place to build your own monsters, I think the 4yo could’ve spent his day over those bricks just fine too.
Unbelievably, the restaurants weren’t really family-friendly: you weren’t allowed to take a pram into any of them, even the one called Family Buffet! This presented a problem as our little one was sleeping, but at least we were allowed to remove the carrycot and bring that one in. Then, of course, we had to make sure nobody tripped over it, so it wasn’t an optimal solution either. Furthermore there was just one line to all the foods, and as everyone got hungry the same time, it was a long one, so you wanted to fill your plate to the max in just one go.
Anyway, we survived the lunch experience. In the evening we had a three course dinner at the hotel restaurant, and that was a good one. As a bonus the restaurant, of course, had a LEGO building corner for kids, so we could dump the kids there for a while once they’d eaten their buffet meals of LEGO brick shaped fries and whatnot.
Leaving Billund
We had thought to leave Billund for Copenhagen the same way we came: by local bus and a train. It turned out, however, that the trains there don’t really do weekends that well! We would’ve needed to use a “togbus”, or train bus, i.e. a bus that replaces a train connection, and there would’ve been more transfers. What finally killed this path for us was that a baby would’ve needed their own safety seat in those buses! So, we just booked a 50 minute SAS flight from Billund to Copenhagen instead.
The Billund airport is the second largest in Denmark, but still, as you might guess, pretty small. There’s maybe four restaurants and you can see them all in the same place. We had some snacks and then had an uneventful ATR 72 flight.
Copenhagen
We arrived to the now-familiar Copenhagen airport at about 16:30 and after collecting our luggage headed for the trains, as we knew from Wednesday where they left from. The local trains weren’t sticking to their schedule back then and they weren’t doing it this time either, but the wait wasn’t too long anyway, and the trip itself was something around ten minutes.
Our hotel was called Good Morning City Copenhagen Star and it was basically right next to the central railway station. The room got a spontaneous “wow!” from the kids, being light and spacious compared to the dim and crammed, more traditional hotel room we had at Hotel LEGOLAND. Indeed, the room had the possibility to fit five adults and a baby crib without feeling tight! The staff was also super helpful and friendly and, when we asked for recommendations for “anything but hamburgers”, pointed us to a nearby restaurant called Frk. Barners Kælder that served local food. 😋 I had a huge Wiener Schnitzel and the kids had some stew and a part of my schnitzel, as I had a part of their minced beef steak too.
The next morning we had a good breakfast at the hotel and headed to see the Nyhavn area, that we’d also seen in Miniland the day before yesterday, by metro. The metro is fully automatic so that you can see directly into the tunnel from both ends of the train, and the kids found this fascinating. The 4yo especially appreciated the controls that were painted or sticker’d into the table in front of the window and guided the train and its doors enthusiastically through the tunnels and stations. 🚇
After Nyhavn we still had to make a visit to a LEGO store for some souvenirs – we hadn’t picked up any sets from LEGOLAND or the Lego House. An open store was found at the entrance of the Tivoli amusement park, right outside of it. The store has two floors and is not too big, but it had Star Wars sets, and that’s all we needed. My wife thought that 75383 Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator would’ve been cool, but the younger one counted the minifigures and set his sights to the 75372 Clone Trooper & Battle Droid Battle Pack. The older one, however, saw a cool new Jedi character in 75378 BARC Speeder Escape, so as a compromise… we got them both.
After this it was time to get our bags from the hotel and head for the airport. As we had learned the local trains had troubles with their schedules, and the automatic metro was a more pleasant method of travel anyway, we took the metro instead. There was a transfer in the middle so we arrived to the airport a bit later than we’d wanted, but still didn’t need to rush.
Once we had packed the pram again and dropped them and the other luggage off, the 4yo won another extra security scrutiny check. 😂 (Pro tip: if you’ve bought a large bag to cover the pram in the plane cargo space, remove it from your luggage before dropping the luggage to be taken to the plane so that you have it when you start packing the pram.) Then we walked through the tax-free shop and spent our last krones to some sweets and cookies. (We actually had just a tiny amount of local money and used a card everywhere.)
After all this the clock had advanced by a surprisingly large number of minutes, so we beelined to the other end of the airport for our gate. If the Billund airport had been small, the Copenhagen one is huge! It handles some 30 million passengers annually, roughly twice the number the Helsinki airport does. So the walk took some 15 minutes, after which we barely had time for a quick toilet break before the gate opened for boarding.
Conclusion
Despite the minimal planning ahead of the trip (booking the Billund-Copenhagen flight was an embarrassingly last minute addition to the itinerary) the trip was a great success. The older kids will hopefully have something to reminisce for years – even if it’s the fancy jungle gym at the hotel, or the Copenhagen metro. The little one, of course, won’t remember a thing, but it was still heartwarming to see how happy he, too, was when he realized on Sunday evening that he was finally getting back to his very own bed at home. ♥️