On a recent trip to Denmark we embraced our inner child and visited one of the country’s top attractions, Legoland. After reading Helen Russell’s book, The Year of Living Danishly, we couldn’t resist the Legoland experience. Russell describes her year of adjusting to Danish culture when she accompanied her husband to Denmark, where he had a one-year assignment with Lego. We were intrigued and just had to check it out for ourselves.
Legoland is located in the small Danish city of Billund, which is essentially a company town centered around everything Lego. Billund only has about 6,000 people but because of Lego, it boasts the country’s second largest airport, directly adjacent to the Lego head offices and Legoland.
After having visited Disney World a few weeks previously, we found that Legoland is everything Disney World is not. Each of the two parks is a reflection of the culture of which it is a part. Disney World is big, noisy and full of artificiality designed to excite and to extract money from its customers. Legoland is small, polite and its attractions are designed more to entertain than to exploit. It’s genuinely family-friendly atmosphere and cute Lego designs would very likely never be enough to keep American youngsters, or their parents, entertained. Where Disney World is exhausting, Legoland is uplifting. Disney World is high-tech, Legoland is lo-tech. At Disney World it seemed like people were on a hell-bent quest to get in line for the next adrenaline-producing attraction. At Legoland, people sort of meander from one place to another. After all, figures made of Legos just aren’t quite as exciting as Star Wars.
Where Disney World has Tomorrow Land, Frontier Land, etc. Legoland has Pirate Land, Mainland, Adventure Land, Polar Land, Ninjago World and, our favorite, Legoredo Town, where a Danish version of the American West is portrayed.
We have been to Amsterdam, Kennedy Space Center and Washington. Why did we bother? It’s all here at Legoland.
Here, under the watchful supervision of zookeepers, visitors can lean over a railing and personally feed the elephants carrots and apples sold at a nearby stand. This is a hit with visitors and it looks like the elephants enjoy the experience too.
Regardless of one’s opinions of zoos in general, Hagenbeck’s is one of the best examples we’ve seen of respecting and caring for animals outside their natural habitat. From central Hamburg the park can be reached by taking the U2 to Hagenbecks Tierpark station. Their website is www. hagenbeck-tierpark.de.
Reconstructed buildings are those shown with green roofs in this photo.
Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, Belgium has been one of Jay and Tanya’s favorite places for years.
Built in 1180, it was the home of the Counts of Flanders until the 14th century. At one point in history the castle was used as a prison and it now houses a torture museum complete with various means of inflicting physical punishment. This brings up another whole subject——why do so many towns in Belgium and Germany have an obligatory “torture museum”? I mean, it seems like some places that perhaps never had a history of torture at all now have opened a museum catering to bloodthirsty tourists eager to see examples of the iron chair, the rack or the head crusher. Yikes!! But, I think this kind of stuff actually did take place at Gravensteen.
First of all, Brest is not one of those places tourists usually flock to. For one thing, it rains a lot here, an annual average of almost 48 inches in fact. Still not a lot by Oregon standards (Eugene 46”, Astoria 67”) but enough to keep most fair-weather tourists away. Secondly, Brest was almost completed destroyed in World War II so there’s not much for tourists to see. Located at the very westernmost tip of France, this seaport town of 140,000 is blessed with an important harbor that began serving the French navy in 1631. Unfortunately, Brest’s strategic location has also been a curse, since it was also the home of a large German U-Boat base during World War II. This made Brest a primary objective after the Allied invasion at Normandy in 1944. The plan was to take Brest and then use the port to help supply the Allied troops advancing across France. But the occupying Germans had other ideas. It took the Allies over six weeks to finally take the heavily defended city and in the course of the battle, practically all of Brest was completely destroyed. Before finally surrendering, the Germans destroyed most of the port facilities, making it useless to the Allies. Today, Brest is the home of France’s main naval training centers and a base for its nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines.
For any of our readers old enough to remember, Cherbourg was the setting for the 1964 film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve (The Most Beautiful Woman in the World). The movie was a smash, winning the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and the folks of Cherbourg have never forgotten it. 
Wandering around town we discovered the Parc Emmanuel Liais. Mr. Liais was a former mayor of Cherbourg and dedicated much of his life to developing the grounds of this botanical garden. 
Naturally, Tanya was very excited about this place. 
German bunkers still are in place along the shoreline. 
And, on the nearby city hall, we found this plaque dedicated to the memory of an American soldier, William F. Finley. 
We did a little research and found that on June 26, 1944, Sergeant Bill Finley had just celebrated his 20th birthday, one day before dashing under fire across Cherbourg’s main square to liberate the city hall, as part of the US Army’s 9th Infantry Division. Finley was from Decatur, Illinois and had joined the army in 1942 at age 17. He was later killed in action on April 1, 1945 in Germany, near Bad Kreuznach. He was just one of thousands of US soldiers who fought and died to liberate France.
We can only hope that today’s leaders have learned something from the disasters of the past.
(source: Wikipedia)
He wanted the hotel to be a resort designed as “an exclusive and opulent playground for the world’s most privileged elite”, according to the visitors’ brochure. To handle the overflow from the Ponce de Leon, he built the Alcazar hotel across the street, a place almost as grand. 
The Alcazar now houses a museum and the St. Augustine City Hall. Visitors are advised to leave their weapons at the door. 
And, they don’t want any vagrants hanging around the sidewalk and sitting on the hedge.
At the entrance to the college, there’s a very dignified statue of old Henry. 
We couldn’t help comparing it to the statue of Emil Faber in the movie, Animal House: “Knowledge is Good”. Maybe the Animal House producers were thinking of old Henry when they made the film.
This area is so massive that it really takes a full day to appreciate. 
Normally, after the payload is about to be placed in orbit, these re-usable boosters drop off, re-enter the atmosphere and land in the ocean. That was the case in the space shuttle launches and the boosters then had to be recovered, an often tricky and dangerous phase of the operation.
Rodriguez especially liked the castles he had seen on the Rhine River in Germany and tried to replicate some of what he had seen.
Never Left Home 