It’s not true to say that this has been an adult-centric trip. We schlepped to Belfast and are on our way to Stockholm because our kids wanted to visit museums in those cities. We have visited any number of kid-friendly museums and playgrounds over the last six months. But everything we have done so far also held appeal for adults, even if that appeal was just “sit on bench, drink coffee, and read” while kids play. Legoland is in a different category. It was a special trip to an out-of-the-way place for two full days of kid-focused fun in a kid-focused place.

Legoland is a traditional theme park, with lego-themed versions of all the usual roller coasters and flume rides and 3D experiences. The kids enjoyed the rides, the lines were quite manageable, and it was easy to find a shady spot to enjoy a picnic lunch. It was a long day and a couple of the rides were officially deemed “too scary,” but overall it was a great success.

We stayed in the adjacent Legoland Hotel, which is everything a kid could want — themed rooms, Lego sets waiting on your pillow, a lobby full of Lego games, Lego sets handed out at breakfast. And truthfully, it was a nice break for grown-ups too: to be in a place where the kids yelling in the hallway weren’t always ours, and where we didn’t need to drive and navigate and park to start and end the day.

However, the real highlight was not Legoland itself, but the nearby Lego House. Opened in 2017 and home to some 25-million lego bricks, it’s essentially just an amazing place to go play Lego. There are some cool digital components — our kids especially liked recording stop-motion lego movies — but really it’s a temple to analogue, unstructured play. We loved it.