Who needs Glastonbury when there’s another festival taking place this summer that’s full of family friendly fun?
Legoland Windsor is hosting the Lego Festival throughout the summer holidays and it’s full of brick-based activities for fans of all ages. So, then, an ideal day out for our family, with our five-year-old son and our daughter, two, both keen builders.
There are plenty of play opportunities at the Lego Festival (Image: Legoland)
All the activities are included in the standard admission price, and to take part all you need to do is collect a stamp sheet shortly after getting through the gates. The accompanying wristband – reminiscent of those worn at music festivals – is a nice touch too.
There are five zones dotted around the park and you only need to complete activities at three to win the prize – thankfully for us, as we completely missed the first zone near the entrance and only found out where it was later on. It did mean we missed the Pokemon zone, though, which offered a chance to experience Lego’s new Smart Play technology.
A rocket launch at Miniland (Image: Newsquest)
Once we made our way out of Miniland – our children could have stayed there all day watching the trains go round – we found the F1 thrill zone.
This offered activities including a pit stop challenge and costumed racing characters on stage, and to get their first festival stamp our children had to build a model car and race it down a ramp.
Watching the Lego cars from the thrill zone go down the ramp (Image: Newsquest)
While our eldest spent time finding pieces to make his car exactly how he wanted, our youngest’s approach was just grab anything and shove it on – and both thoroughly enjoyed pushing their vehicles down the ramp a few times.
After the first build challenge it was time to try out a few rides. Our son had good fun on the helicopter ride in the Duplo-themed land, as well as taking part in the driving school. A boat ride featuring Lego models of fairytale characters was a rather pleasant break from the busy crowds that seemed to overwhelm our youngest, too.
Our son puts a Lego flower on display (Image: Newsquest)
After lunch – there are multiple places to get food but we chose to bring a picnic – we found the chill out zone, where children enjoyed creating flowers to put on a wall while parents could rest weary legs for a few minutes on a beanbag.
We’d also spotted the signage for the music zone, which includes live performances at certain times during the day, but when we found the place to build there was a queue so we decided against joining it.
Trying our little hands at Lego building (Image: Newsquest)
Instead, we headed towards the creative zone where we were invited to use our imagination to build a creature.
This meant our children could collect their final stamp and pick up their prize on the way out.
We went on a couple of nearby rides that had caught our son’s eye – a hot air balloon that offered views over the park and a fire engine one that involved pumping and spraying water into holes.
Our son enjoyed the balloon ride (Image: Newsquest)
Then it was back up to Miniland for another look at all the fantastic models for our children and their dad and a dash over to the rather exhilarating Minifigure Speedway ride for me.
On the way out of the park we handed in our stamp sheets and were given a three-in-one Lego set as a reward. We’d had lots of fun at the Lego Festival and the extra activities made a nice addition to the park’s usual offering.