Chicago is home to the first indoor Legoland in North America

by Scott Carmichael on

Last month, Lego opened its first US based Legoland Discovery Center in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg.

This large indoor venue is home to 8 Lego themed attractions, and should provide some Lego fun for visitors young and old. In the name of scientific research, I visited Legoland during their “soft opening” week at the end of July.

The location is right next to Woodfield Mall, and is in the middle of the Streets of Woodfield entertainment district. There is ample free parking. Schaumburg is about 20 miles from downtown Chicago, but there is no easy public transport system linking the two, unless you don’t mind a 45 minute CTA ride, a 30 minute bus ride and a 10 minute trolley ride.

This is the third Legoland Discovery center in the world; previous venues opened in Berlin and Duisburg in Germany. They are operated by the Merlin Entertainments group, who also own the Madame Tussauds wax museums.

The Chicago Legoland Discovery Center is quite easy to spot, partly thanks to the 30 foot giraffe built over the entrance. Once inside, you pass through “Mini Land”, which consists of almost all famous Chicago landmarks, recreated with 1.5 million Lego bricks.

Next up is Adventure Trail, where “Johnny Thunder” introduces himself, and warns you about the dangers of the Lego jungle. Kids will love having their photo taken next to a Lego lion, parrot and various other “wild” animals.

Once you leave the jungle, you arrive in the atrium where several full scale Lego heroes are on display, including Batman and Harry Potter. This is yet another great photo opportunity. This is also where you will find the Dragon Ride. This ride is not as scary as the name implies, and has no age/height restrictions. The 4 person cars take you through several castle scenes at 2 mph, and bring you up close and personal with a massive “fire” breathing Lego dragon.

The rest of the center is upstairs, where you’ll find the Lego 4D theater. This movie theater combines a 3D Lego movie with several other effects, I’ll leave it at that, as I don’t want to spoil any surprises. When you enter the theater, you are handed 3D glasses, but smaller kids will need some help keeping the glasses on. Without the special glasses, the movie looks blurry. The movie lasts 15 minutes and lines to get in can be fairly long, so get in line as soon as you can.

Across from the theater is the Lego factory tour. In this room, a Legoland employee explains how Lego blocks are made, and several machines show the process. Kids are invited to participate by pressing some of the buttons, and at the end of the narration, everyone receives a special Chicago Legoland brick.

The rest of the attractions are across the central hall. This large and bright room has something for everyone. If you are tired, you’ll be able to grab a snack from the Lego cafe. Toddlers can run around in the soft climb and slide zone and larger kids (or adults) can build Lego cars and race against others on a massive inclined racetrack.

There are tables with Lego buckets everywhere, and several soft Duplo building zones for smaller kids. In the rear corner is an entire area where toddlers and infants can play with extra large foam Lego blocks. They’ll have a blast building towers and walls here (I know I did!)

When you leave Legoland, you pass through the obligatory gift shop, which sells some fairly hard to find Lego items, so prepare to deal with begging kids and parting with more of your money.

Admission to the Chicago Legoland Discovery Center is $19 for adults and $15.00 for kids. Children 2 and under are free. I found the admission price to be fairly high; a family with 2 kids will cost $68 to get in, and you’ll have a hard time keeping the kids entertained for more than 2 or 3 hours. The Legoland Discovery Center is open 7 days a week from 10am till 8pm, but ticket sales end at 6pm.

Lines to get into the Legoland Discovery Center are often wrapped around the building. so I strongly advise purchasing your tickets in advance, as you’ll then be able to skip the long line for the ticket desk. If you arrive with pre-purchased tickets, you can enter through the right hand set of doors. This online advance purchase service also sells off-peak tickets, if you arrive past 3:30pm, you’ll save $2.50 on each ticket.

All in all I found the Legoland Discovery Center quite enjoyable, as did my 2 year old daughter. The entrance fee is steep, but unless you plan to fly to California, this is the closest you’ll get to Legoland in the Midwest.

Dispatches from around the world


Free public theater tickets in Central Park to see “Hair.” The how to get them and why I’m feeling miffed

by Jamie Rhein on

An article I read in the New York Times last Thursday night left me feeling miffed. It explains one reason why it can be difficult to snag tickets to see “Hair,” the current, free Shakespeare in the Park Public Theater production at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater.

It’s called CHEATING. Clever, but CHEATING.

According to the article, there are people who are hired to wait in lines by people who don’t want to wait in line themselves. The line at the Delacorte Theater is one example of where this hired-line waiting cleverness happens.

And, why am I MIFFED?!

As a person who STOOD IN LINE with my brother and my 6-year-old son on August 6, slathering on sunscreen and sweltering, waiting for the line to move into the shade, but DID NOT get tickets, I’m annoyed.

Here is the saga. The good news first: My brother lives in Manhattan, therefore, I have the enviable position of having a place to stay whenever I show up in the Big Apple for a visit.

The smart news: Knowing that anything can happen in Manhattan, we had back-up plans when we took our spot after walking past the gobs and gobs of people already waiting when we walked the distance from the subway stop to the end of the line. Some were reading in the lawn chairs they had the foresight to bring with them, and others were eating a picnic feast.

The not so smart news: We showed up at 11:00 hoping for the best. Getting tickets can mean arriving in line as early as 6:00 A.M. As if, I’d drag my son to Central Park at 6 A.M. for an 7-hour wait. Hardly.

The way the line works: Tickets, you see, are handed out at 1 A.M. Depending on your spot in line, you can be done soon after, or be still waiting at 2 if the tickets or vouchers for tickets hold out. Although we showed up awfully late, a woman who works for the theater assured us that we had a chance. I call her Friendly Explainer. Friendly Explainer pointed to a lamp post past us in line and said, “People that far back have gotten tickets.”

She also pointed to a spot way, way, way, way, way, in front of us and said that tickets are gone well before then as well.

While we waited, another man with the theater–Helpful Guy, told us the procedures for getting tickets once they begin to hand them out.

Another woman, let’s call her Line Watch Dog, stood at the end to make sure that we all minded our P’s and Q’s.

Here are the P’s and Q’s:

  1. Each person in line can get 2 tickets.
  2. There is no line jumping.
  3. You can not save a spot for someone else.
  4. You CAN NOT LEAVE the line for any reason. If you LEAVE THE LINE, you lose your spot. It doesn’t matter if you are sweltering and feeling faint, hungry and need to something to eat or you will be tempted to eat the grass, or if you have to pee so badly that you can hardly stand it.It does not matter if the people you happen to be waiting with will save your spot. DO NOT LEAVE THE LINE for any reason.

My son did leave the line to go play on the playground close by, but he was whining so much from the heat and boredom of waiting that Line Watch Dog may have been happy for him to leave the line.

I also gave him money for the ice-cream truck that came by. As if it would have been possible to stand him if I had said no. Line Watch Dog may have even given him money herself.

Since I had already agreed to let him take off his shirt, when Sponge Bob melted all down his chest, cleaning him up with a bit of bottled water wasn’t a problem.

By 1:45 p.m. we found out we did not get tickets or vouchers to possibly get tickets later in the day. If you are given a voucher you can come back at 6:30 to see if you can get unclaimed tickets. I was thrilled to not get a voucher because, being the obsessed person that I am to get anything free, I would have been right back in line at 5:30 p.m. waiting in line. A stupid way to spend one of the only two days one has in New York City. It’s a big city with lots to do.

Why are there unclaimed tickets? Here is what Friendly Woman explained:

The Delacorte has 1,800 seats. Some of the seats are given to corporate sponsors, but on any given day, the theater doesn’t know how many of those people will come or exactly how many tickets will be available to the general public. Each day is a surprise.

Personally, I find it ironic that the public can’t really get all that many tickets to public theater on certain days because private donors get most of the tickets. Just a thought. I don’t think this is bad necessarily. It’s just an observation. As the tickets are being given out, they don’t know how many people in line will be taking one or two tickets.

Once the tickets are gone, a certain number of vouchers are handed out. If you get a voucher, you may get a ticket later, but again, they won’t know until they see how many people who have corporate tickets don’t show up to claim their seats, or how many people who got tickets earlier decide not to come and bring their tickets back.

And also, there are those UNETHICAL CHEATERS who hire people to show up to wait in line for them. The hired help show up at 6:00.

And that’s the story of why we didn’t see “Hair.”

Although, ticket luck was not ours to have, we did have a good time thanks to the ice-cream truck and the people we visited with who were also waiting. One of the women in line was asked out on a date by Kevin Kline when they were in high school.

Coincidentally, I saw Kevin Kline in Pirates of Penzance at the Delacorte Theater years ago when it was easier to get tickets. That’s what makes New York City a surprise. There are all sort of crazy connections.

Maybe one of these days when my son is older, we’ll pack breakfast, lunch, games, lawn chairs and books to read and show up at least by 7 a.m. in order to give ourselves a fighting chance. We’ll keep our eye out for the cheaters and give Line Watch Dog a hand.

The show goes through September 14, so you still have time. Since there are no reservations, except for the corporate tickets and Summer Supporters, you have a fighting chance. Be smart. Show up no later than 8 a.m. To be a Summer Supporter, you donate $165.00 to Shakespeare in the Park and you can get a ticket.

(The above picture is one thing we did after we didn’t get tickets. Walk to the pond, where sailboats glide and ducks like to be fed, to see where Stuart Little, the talking mouse had his victory ride in one of the boats.)

Yourdon, who took the first two pictures, did get tickets this summer. So, it is possible.

Trazzler.com: Helps you decide where to travel

by Abha Malpani on

If you can’t decide where to go and you need some direction or original suggestions, you might want to check out travel website Trazzler. What makes you actually want to use this website is 1) Its simplicity 2) The fact that it tries to assess your “travel personality” before it makes suggestions.

Log on and it will give you short trip suggestions wherever you live. I logged on and immediately got 3 recommendations of trips around Madrid, so I’m assuming it picks up where you are logging in from and gives you ready information, (or it’s a random coincidence). Likewise, you can ask for the same for any other destination, or if you want to narrow your search for a trip that (for example) will stimulate your taste buds, you can search under “culinary”.

Then you can fill information about what sort of trips you have already been on, and where you’d like to go. This is partly how they capture some of your emotional qualities and recommend your trips accordingly. For the same purpose, there are also some travel pop-quizzes you can take.

It has a talented team behind it and like Tumblr and Twitter, it functions on an easy platform — so it’s no surprise that the co-founders of Twitter are the “Founding Advisors” (whatever that means) of Trazzler. It’s quick, effortless, and worth a check out.

Talking travel with bicycling pro Lauren Hefferon

by Jerry Guo on

True, the Tour de France ended last month, but this is the perfect time to plan for next year’s event. Here to tell us how to bike in the legendary race yourself–or at least have a good time in the stands–is Lauren Hefferon, a former professional cyclist who has logged 35,000 miles cycling across Europe in her early years after college. She now runs a bicycle touring company, Ciclismo Classico, which runs biking trips throughout Italy, France, Spain, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand.

I’ve been following a wonderful NYTimes blog about an amateur who raced in a leg of this year’s Tour de France. How hard is this to do?

Considering the race is two weeks long and covers over 130 miles a day over the some of the toughest passes in the world, it is considered one of the toughest races in the world. The racers must train all year long and begin at a very young age training their muscles and their mind. The sport is very strategic, rider must not only be fit but they have to understand how to best work together as a team to gain the most advantage over each day’s ride. The team will always assist the favorite rider by blocking, drafting and out sprinting their adversaries,

And what’s the process for those who want to train and get involved in racing–and not just touring?

Potential racers should first be passionate about the sport, have solid endurance and be committed to training regularly and vigorously. The best thing is to join a team so you can have some of your expenses sponsored. Being on a team you will get coaching, support from team members and some of your equipment covered. Cycling can be a very expensive sport and the winnings are not that much. You must commit 3-4 hours a day to training, additional rest and a healthy lifestyle.
Are you following the Tour de France?

I have watched a couple stages. It is exciting but the whole drugging undercurrent is very disturbing. It takes away from my enjoyment of the sport.

Is that worth seeing as a spectator?

It’s fun but chaotic to be on the sidelines. The fans are so passionate and entire villages come out to cheer on their favorite, it is like the villages wake up and grab their favorite spot. Unlike other sports where the admission can be steep, cycling is by the people and for the people. It is free to watch and entire villages come out to be a part of the action. It absolutely raises community spirit.

How would you suggest setting up a trip revolving around the tour?

Well we have several trips that follow bike races. We have a tour that follows the GIRO D’ITALIA, another tour that follows the Tour De France and another one that follows the Maratona degli Dolomiti, a race throughout the Dolomites.

You have to know the course very well. It is too difficult to follow the whole race so we pick 3-4 classic stages that zig zag in the same area. We then plan rides that pedal over some of the course and maybe take a detour later in the day. We ride the course before the racers come and stake out a place to watch the race. When it is over we ride back to our hotel and watch the rest of the race at a bar or at our hotel. Our guests LOVE these follow-the-race tours. There is a wonderful energy that keeps everyone high

Have you competed in any races? I imagine that’s a good–albeit intense–way of seeing different countries.

Yes I raced for my first three years in Italy. It was an excellent way for me to connect with the local people, learn all the wonderful roads and be a part of very energetic, fun loving community. Cyclists in training have a very competitive but playful way to be engaged with their sport. I have done many sports in my life and I always like the training more than the competition. Cycling was no different. I just love to ride and be with people, so while I would ride hard and liked doing well, the people and places were always far more important. This is why I turned to touring. You can stay in excellent shape AND see the countryside and enjoy other’s company. When you are racing, your head is down, you are watching the wheel ahead of you and you do not remember much of the world or people around you.

Now shifting gears a bit (hehe couldn’t help myself). What’s the biking environment like in Europe?

Europeans have tremendous respect for cyclists. They see them as just another vehicle, which they are, just slower. Thanks to racing and the proliferation of basic bike commuting, Europeans easily co-exist with cycling. There are many more small side roads and alternatives to major highways. Gas is $16 a gallon so they woke up long ago to the costs of driving a car.

Unfortunately the car is still winning everywhere in the world and we cyclists have to make our world friendlier, easier and more fun. Cyclists have to continue to fight for their rights. In Italy, cycle commuting is most practical in the cities where you will see elderly women biking side by side with their bag or groceries on their handlebars. Outside the cities it is harder because roads are more difficult. Cycling is hugely popular in the area around Ferrara where it is flat and their is a real passion for cycling

You have to see this site and tell your readers: www.carfree.com

In the states, I think biking cross-country would be a nightmare unless you’ve mapped out all the local routes–freeways are suicidal.

What are your top three biking destinations outside of Europe? I noticed that you’ll be hosting trips to Vietnam and New Zealand, among others.

Well Europe is # ONE for me and allow me to plug my favorite place in the world to bike: Sardinia! My other three favorite places are:

  • The Finger Lakes region
  • Chile and Argentina
  • New Zealand

If anyone is looking for info on our trips, they can of course log onto our site.

I’m off to New Zealand myself in a couple weeks. Any tips for a DIY biking trip there? Is it possible to just rent a bike for a week and bike from lodge to lodge?

There are plenty of local operators to choose from. Here’s one we use.

Speaking of DIY, is it possible to stage a weeklong+ biking trip in a more-or-less undeveloped place–where lodging isn’t guaranteed every night. Are support vehicles a necessity in these cases?

There are an abundance of web sites where you can read and copy other people’s adventures. Here is one of my favorites www.crazyguyonabike.com

Your life list for biking adventures?

1. Bike trip across the USA. Not better way to connect with our own roots
2. Bike and Boat. Island hopping around the Med with bikes on board
3. Rome to Athens, the ancient world by bike
4. Ireland and Scotland
5. Norway
6. South America, the Andes by Mt Bike
7. Australia & New Zealand
8. Anywhere the roads are smooth & untrafficked, the scenery is gorgeous and the people are welcoming

Favorite trip? SARDINIA. Mountains, sea and drop dead gorgeous scenery

See here.

Amtrak train runs out of gas

by Jeffrey White on

Amtrak is seeing a real boom in passengers these days, thanks to the high cost of gas throughout the country and the onslaught of airline fees.

But if you were on one routine run from L.A. to San Diego yesterday, you might have been wishing that you’d coughed up the extra money for a flight.

An Amtrak train from L.A. to San Diego ran out of gas about two hours into the trip Sunday.

The train stood stranded for about two hours before another engine showed up to push it to San Diego, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It arrived early this morning.

Amtrak officials were quick to emphasize that one of its trains losing gas was an unusual occurrence. No word yet on how this actually happened.