We flew from Bergen in Norway to Billund in Denmark (via Copenhagen – can’t go direct) on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) which made me appreciate Virgin’s lovely new planes.. this was a McDonnell Douglas MD-81.
Not sure if it was this particular pilot or not but he was very chatty. We got no less than 6 updates from the flight deck during the 80 minute flight in both Danish and English. Half were weather updates for Copenhagen as well as what we were flying over, had just flown over or were about to fly over. And we arrived 20 minutes early, so early there was another plane still parked in our spot and we had to wait. Then we were personally thanked by the captain, almost to the point of shaking everyone’s hand, when leaving the plane.
Anyway, the reason we came to Billund was to go to Legoland!
Legoland has ten different worlds. There’s normal theme park areas with rides and rollercoasters and then there’s Miniland.
Miniland is where feature landscapes, sights and buildings from all over Denmark as well as famous landmarks from other parts of the world are recreated in 1:20 scale Lego brick models. The level of detail was amazing. Even the plants they chose fitted the theme in size and foliage type. In Miniland, ships sail along the small canals, cranes operate, cars drive and airplanes taxi on the runways of the airport.
We were told by a few people to go and find the Lego museum and robotics lab. Unfortunately it seems they have closed the robotics lab and restricted museum access to the 3 day VIP tour that costs $2500 per person.
On the bus on the way home we overheard some Lego employees having a passionate debate abut the merits of their favourite Lego block that had been unfairly discontinued. I’m not sure which part it was but it was first used in making trapdoors in the Pirate series and last used in the Harry Potter series. It actually took a little while to work out what they were talking about not being familiar with Lego jargon.
As we drove through Billund we passed a number of Lego buildings that had car sized Lego bricks stacked up on the foot path.
See on Streetview here.
There was some pretty cool automation as well. This is a good example of a car being ferried across the canal.