Vajentic Family Western Odyssey: Week 3, Day 17 (Monday, July 29)

Sometimes it's funny, the things that stay with you after some time has passed.  I remember this day being tinged with a touch of disappointment.  Disappointment that led to my own sadness, as I was (unrealistically) trying to make the entire trip perfect.  We all slept in until around 10:30 AM, catching up on some needed sleep.  After taking our time getting up and moving around, we went into Legoland around noon.  The boys were a bit grouchy, so we decided to get them something to eat.  It took a long time for us to wait in line for food.  While in line, Ben whacked Dominic for some reason, and Sharon yelled at him, so he began to cry.  While we were eating, Sharon talked to her mom to try to figure out some problem that we were having with dog care back in Missouri.  After eating, everyone's mood improved a little bit.  We went over into the water park area of the park, where it was super crowded.  I looked into renting a Cabana, and was willing to spend whatever they cost, but they were sold out for the day.  They looked cozy, and would have provided a nice place to hang out at the water park, where it was hard to find any lounge chairs at all.  Sharon and the boys swam, and I found a free lounge chair where I watched our stuff.  There were long lines for some of the water park attractions.  I spent most of the time in the water park people watching and thinking about how I wished we had a cabana.  After the water park, we walked around the rest of the park for a while.  The boys liked playing some of the games and enjoyed going into the stores, but were not interested in riding any of the rides.  We moseyed back to our hotel room at about 4 PM.  It felt like a letdown, because Ben had been so excited about Legoland, and the experience just didn't seem to live up to his expectations in my eyes.  He had been really looking forward to the mini-figure store, thinking that he would be able to buy different kinds of mini-figures, but that's not how it was set up.  He did enjoy trading some of his mini-figures with some of the park attendants, which they would do on demand.  On one occasion, he traded for some clown mini-figures.  Toward evening, Sharon went to swim at the hotel pool, where Dominic joined her for a while.  I took Ben back to the Big Store to buy the Lego Ghost Train and a Lord of the Rings set.  The Big Store is quite impressive, with lots of varieties and sets.  Ben wanted everything, and I wish I could have given him all of it!  For dinner, we ate at the hotel restaurant Brick's Buffet, where we sat outside on the patio.  Dominic really enjoyed the bread sticks.  After dinner, Dominic and Ben played in the Lego pit in the hotel lobby.  This was one of Ben's favorite activities of the day, and maybe of the entire trip.  He would have stayed in the Lego pit for hours.


After going back to our room, we spent some time building some Legos.  Ben stayed up late building his ghost train, and I worked on the boxcar from the other train set he had purchased.  I ran out to the car to retrieve Sharon's book, the phone charger and Domi's medicine.  Throughout the night, I was monitoring the Pirates game against the Cardinals on my phone, which the Bucs ended up winning 9-2.  I was beginning to feel like I needed some exercise on this trip, so I began doing some push ups.  I shaved.  I loaded some pictures from my new camera onto the computer, and then figured out how to add comments to pictures in Windows.  Dominic had bought a Star Wars set and a small Hobbit set from the Lego store, so he spent some time building on those.  The boys and I all three slept in the bunk room, and gave Sharon the bed to herself.
















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