Denmark

Our first stop in Denmark was Billund. Billund is the home of the original Legoland but it is currently closed until mid-Spring. To satisfy Lego fans in the off season, they opened Lego House in 2017 – an indoor Lego playground filled with 25 million Lego bricks! Wow! It is such a cool place!

The first thing we did was collect our ‘Lego House 6 Bricks’ (a bag containing 6 identical 2×4 red Lego bricks that are being moulded and packaged as you watch) and our computer generated combination. There are 915,103,776 ways that 6 bricks can be arranged so your combination is currently unique to you. As yet, number 1 has not been generated and even the staff have no idea what it will look like!

Lego House is organised into 4 experience zones, each with a colour and a different kind of interaction. The red zone represents creative competence, green represents social competence, blue represents cognitive competence, and yellow represents emotional competence. In each zone, you scan your wrist band and then any photos, videos etc that you create during your time are linked to your account for you to download later.

The final thing we did was create our own mini figures in our own likeness:

In hindsight, we could have easily spent a couple of days at Lego House – we had completely underestimated how cool it would be. We had SO much fun!

From Billund, we drove up to Aalborg to stay with our friends Susan and David (again from our wonderful Dunedin days) and their daughter Emma. It had been over 21 years since we had seen them but again, we just picked up where we had left off. We had such a wonderful weekend and we felt so lucky to have time together with them. It was Susan’s birthday the evening we arrived so we were treated to a delicious birthday dinner made by David and a traditional family birthday cake made by Susan – yum! The weather was absolutely glorious on Saturday so we took a trip to Stensnæs Strand beach – the perfect beach for picking up treasures…except these treasures are 1000s of years old! Bones and shells washed ashore from ancient middens! Amazing!

That evening we introduced the Lusseau family to ‘Dutch Blitz’ with much hilarity, banter and joy! The rest of the weekend was spent chilling and enjoying each other’s company (with a visit to the trampoline park to blow off some energy). Emma kindly shared her Lego and other toys from her childhood so Zara played for hours – to join the 5 Sylvanian cats she was allowed to bring on our trip, she created a new friend “Corky” (complete with a chair and a ‘serviette and Danish flag’ bed) and and was lucky enough to be gifted “Inky” the crocheted octopus.

Susan, David and Emma – thank you for a most wonderful weekend! It was such a pleasure to spend time with you and we are so grateful for your kindness. It was so amazing to reconnect so easily and for the kids to make connections with people we have talked about over the years (David used to work at the Nestlé factory every summer…). Thank you and see you again soon!

From Aalborg, it was a short drive to the top of Denmark to catch the ferry to Larvik for the next 4 weeks in Norway!