Everything is awesome in Legoland.

Everything is awesome. At least in Legoland it is. Having 2 little Lego-enthusiasts and married to a self-proclaimed Lego Master Builder, we were all pretty excited to go to San Diego and check out Legoland. If you are planning a trip there, read below or check out the video of our trip to Legoland and the beach town of La Jolla.

It's worth it to stay at the Legoland Hotel. Yes, it is expensive. I had the 3 night stay in my online shopping cart for over 6 months before I winced and clicked to proceed with payment. It was worth it though. Both the older 'brick' hotel and the newer castle hotel are right in front of the main entrance of the theme park. When you stay at the Leogland Hotel, you get in an hour earlier and we did 2 days of 9:00 am to 9:00 pm! When you've been out all day for 12 hours, it was the best thing ever to walk a few steps to get back to the hotel room. Plus the hotel has a pool with huge foamy Lego bricks you and can build with and an outdoor movie screen where they show a Lego movie every evening.

The Legoland Hotel Room, the rooms are awesomely Lego-themed. You can pick Ninjago, Nexo Knights, Lego Friends, adventure themed...my kids decided they wanted to be Lego Pirates and had so much fun in their pirate-themed room. When you stay in the Legoland Hotel, the kids also get to do a daily scavenger hunt and the code unlocks a security safe and inside is a Lego set for each of them. Three little Lego sets for each day of our stay! The kids thought it was just awesome.

The Legoland Brick Buffet restaurant serves delicious foods. Your hotel stay comes with buffet breakfast every morning and we also had dinner there one evening. They have a kids buffet area that is built lower down so my kids could easily self serve piles of chocolate chip pancakes, fruit loops and yogurt. The adult buffet area serves made-to-order omelettes, bacon, waffles, pancakes, bagels...basically every breakfast food you could want...even churros and soft serve ice cream.

The rides at Legoland are geared for younger kids. If your kids like thrilling rides, the rides at Playland are probably more intense than the rides at Legoland. But a lot of the rides are Lego-themed and driving a Lego car and a Lego boat is pretty awesome.

 There are also some Legoland-specific rides like the Ninjago ride where you put on 3D glasses and you need to ninja chop your way through the ride. There was also a really fun ride called Deep Sea Adventure where you go in a real submarine and go on a mission to spy things in the water where there are real fish, sting rays and sharks swimming!

Don't forget to check out the Lego 4D movies. There are several different 20 minute Lego movies showing throughout the day. A good break from walking around the theme park and also to get out of the hot sun.

Spend a day or at least an afternoon at the Legoland Waterpark. We spent part of the second day building lego rafts and jumping waves in the impressive Lego Chima wave pool. My kids are pretty wimpy when it comes to waterslides, there were some really fun looking slides and tube rides that they were too scared to do. They were more than happy in the Lego Duplo play area...a shallow pool with little slides made for toddlers and preschoolers.... and my wimpy kids.

Do Legoland Sea Life at night. The Legoland aquarium is open from 8:00-9:00 pm after the theme park is closed so we did it at the end of the day and it worked out well. It didn't take longer than an hour to see everything in the relatively smaller aquarium and the kids had a scavenger map where they had to go to different stations and stamp their Sea Life passports.

Bring your Lego mini-figures from home to trade! All the Legoland staff from the server at the restaurant, the cashier at the gift shop and all the ride operators have Lego figurines with them and you can trade with them anytime. The kids loved scoping out all the mini-figures out there and trading up.

Ask for Lego Pop Badges and look out for Mr. Gold. Each ride operator has "pop badges", these free collectable souvenir badges that they will give you if you just ask. Did I mention they are free ? This mama is always on the hunt for freebies. They sell Legoland lanyards to keep your pop badges on or you can bring your own ahead of time and save yourself the money. And then there's the ultra exclusive "Mr. Gold Pop Badge". This is what it is - there are 9 random Legoland staff members wearing the rare Mr. Gold pop badge each day, no one knows who they are and where they will be but if you spot someone wearing Mr. Gold, you run up and ask for it and it is worth a FREE ticket to Legoland! We were lucky enough to find someone wearing Mr. Gold on his board shorts at the Legoland water park. We already had tickets for our days at Legoland so we have decided to keep this rare souvenir. Apparently you can sell it on eBay for a lot of money so if the kids ever need more money in their college fund, we can cash in Mr. Gold!

Collect pictures of all your memories. We bought a multi-pass photo bracelet and it allows you to have digital access to all the pictures from your time at Legoland. You just scan your bracelet and the pictures get loaded onto your account so at the end of your trip you have  all the pictures from the rides and every character meet and greet there was. We don't get family pictures very often and now we have a dozen hilarious ones with all the different Lego characters. I think our Christmas card this year might just be us trying to eat the Lego hot dog guy.... ..good one right?