Legogal

Wow! What a cool video and description of the dump truck's features! I want one of these, too! My favorite part is the pneumatic lift...fun to watch. Reminds me of the huge dump trucks that deliver 20 cubic feet or more of mulch for our yard for about 400usd per load. It usually takes about five loads, so I get to watch some big dumps!

Very nice design with all of the many plates resembling nicely laid, thin pieces of stone used in so many facades of many famous buildings. Would dread building this one with a gazillion bricks it looks like! It seems that the ground floor would be a bit dark...it is clear that you built in some privacy from the nearby street. What would happen if you used larger windows there and place tall plants inside because there is no room outside...to give the inside privacy and light? Or used some skylights to the balcony on the roof? Again the design looks wonderful!

Hahaha! Oz is much more civilized than West Texas where I grew up! Heck back in 1973 you even had more miles of paved highway than our state and many more pubs. It seemed that families practically lived in those pubs every afternoon...quite civilized to me, but then I was really from the boonies and lived in central Alaska during college. So what did I know! And the Aussies I met could read and write as well....so take that you Aussie bashers...hehehe!

Wow! That is a load of very cool concerts! It must be much easier to hear famous bands in the EU because the distances between big cities are so much shorter. Many of the best concerts I have heard were there as well and were by famous orchestras, the most recent being the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Abbado in May. The most touching was Rostropovich conducting in London with Fournier on cello. For sheer performance magic, Julio rocked the crowd of old ladies in Paris in 2005. In the US I heard Jose Feliciano, the Jefferson Starship and Sting during college days. In the past twenty years the Moody Blues, Coldplay, Annie Lennox, Leonard Cohen, Joshua Bell on violin with the NC Symphony, and Sting again...his performance was much better in 1985. Still on my to do list is Yo Yo Ma (and some other classical performers.) There were only country western concerts in Texas where I grew up, and I hated that music until my thirties. Y'all are so fortunate to have so many great performances nearby. The Led Zep, Doors, Dylan, Chicago, and Joni Mitchell were on my dream list in earlier decades.

Very nice chemist shop! Have seen these in many countries and knew exactly what it was. I agree with Hinck...some curves on the top front and top sides would swing it more towards Art Deco. And the addition if a pastel color or two would make it sing IMHO. This s very exciting news!

Yup, I love Standing Small, too. Always happy to see more LEGO books. And DK does a fantastic job as to quality.

Help! Duh...what are you saying here? Byggepladen? How do you lay 26 miles of Lego? What will it look like? Sounds amazing and wonderful however you may do it! Good luck!

The reviews of L Malaysia on tripadvisor are generally positive except for the lack of shade in the Park. Living in Malaysia gives you a major advantage over most of us because we are not accustomed to that amount of intense tropical sun and humidity. Is there any way they can quickly add more shade to make visitors more comfortable? We built two 10by10 ft. arbors on our back patio covered by screen that blocks 85 per cent of the sunlight so we can have a shaded garden next to the house. Could they do something like that to protect the visitors a bit? When I lived on the Pacific island of Truk in the Mariana's forty years ago, the tropical sun could produce a sun burn in half an hour that required hospitalization, so we are talking about a serious problem here. With no alternative like waiting for a cooler time of he year because there is not one. What did you think of the "heat" problem? And what can the Park do to minimize the problem? Thanks for your advice. Pepp, Your hat request is noted. Any color preference? Working on plans to visit FL and California Parks within the next six months. Wish Santa could drop 500k frequent flyer points in my stocking, and I could knock off the other three I have not visited. But that is what a bucket list is for...

Wow, yall are so brave trying to bricklink the huge modulars like GG and CC! Ohmygod! That is so much work that it makes my head ache! I have learned to buy the darn modulars I want when they come out. Then if they do go on sale somewhere, I try to pick up a second one. That way I can modify the second one and still have one original, used, set. It works. BUt then I don't buy every set in the themes I collect. I wonder what it takes to get them to reissue a wildly popular set? Has it ever been done? Good luck!

CONGRATULATIONS!!! A good way to find minifig names is to go to bricklink.com and look under "buy, mini fig" by theme. It lists all the character names. What country do you live in and language do they speak in your area? This could make a difference. Best wishes as you open a new chapter in your lives!

1. I would teach my mostly pastel and female minifigs to build themselves selecting the torsos, faces, hair, etc. that they want for a change. Then they would get to spend a day at my pastel mall....drinking coffee in the bookstore, shopping for clothes and LEGO, catching a film, and enjoying watching the swans in the lake. And adding any features and stores they want. And of course a visit to the medical and dental clinics at the mall for basic check ups...who knows how long it has been since they have seen a doctor or dentist. 2. Then they could take a walk in the park, bicycle along the paths to the lake, or go to the gym or pool for some exercise. And maybe stop at the grocery store for the food they like. 3. They could design, build and landscape new cottages and pick/design a vehicle using Creator set plans as reference tools . 4. And choose with whom they want to live with. (This could become interesting. Once I held roommate try outs that required sight reading a simple Bach piece on the piano, cooking dinner, and doing a load of wash. it worked, and the roomies were good neighbors!) 5. I would try not to make them my slaves as their lives have been dull enough living so many years in large pink Rubbermaid containers. But it would be tempting to train them to pick up and sort LEGO, vacuum and do the laundry. (I don't mind doing the yard work, but inside cleaning is not the high point in my life.) 6. When I leave the house for errands, a few could go with me every day so they could learn the lay out of the BIG TOWN and remind me when I forget to do an important errand, like buy gas for the Prius or make a bank deposit the old fashioned way with paper checks at a real bank. 7. And of course they need a job, so that would require teaching them how to work in my home office. They would be skilled on the phones, drawing up proposals for contracts, describing what we do, writing invoices, paying bills, and answering questions of customers. This means I would have a back up to cover for me when I am out of the home office...woooohooo! And of course they need commensurate pay checks! Otherwise the Dept. of Labor would arrest me for hiring illegal aliens. This could keep me occupied for many years....oh, what fun! (And they don't have to worry about nuclear annihilation by SW guys or shooting posses or hanging a la the Lone Ranger. And the many other violent means of departing Planet Earth contained in the other themes.) They could just be Friends Forever....sounds blissful, doesn't it!

This is impressive! Would an automatic door opener (like they use for the disabled) have enough strength to pop open the rubber seals on the fridge) work? These openers are mechanical and exert a strong push on doors. Better yet, how about installing a Coke machine loaded with all of your favorite drinks? Your robot hits the correct button, and picks up the cold drink from the chute. Wait, are you drinking your beer cold? And your are Dutch? Are you ill?

Wow! A super looking guy and a super review! (Won't ask if you had to look and act 14 or under to participate in this build. They require that in the US, and I have looked high and low for a kid that age whom I could rent for an hour to get these store builds....to no avail!) These monthly builds draw huge crowds in our small LEGO store, so I avoid that time of the month by staying away. Yesterday there was a really cute 6 year old Superman dressed kid in the store...complete with mask and booties. He was adorable...should have taken his photo while he was looking at the Superman sets. Maybe the store should give you a ten percent discount when wearing a costume of the theme you are buying? Boy, would that draw the weirdo adults out of their caves around here! I would even manage to find a Friends or Duplo costume.....maybe the store could just sell costumes (in adult sizes) to match the figures. (They have done that quite successfully at the American Girl Doll stores and in their catalogs.) Imagine how many boys want to look like Superman....woooohooo for us ladies!

Ha! I have a bunch of these sitting on the shelf, too, just waiting to become part of something! How about building several towers of 4-6 pieces each and stringing a rope bridge between your castles with them? That way you would be high enough to be out of enemy range but could go from castle to castle. It could also be fun to build a huge treehouse in a huge tree so the little people could sword fight and pretend they were big, bad, mean knights. My husband and one son seemed to be into sword fighting for over a decade, so knights or pirates...take your choice. They staged battles in a large pile of sand out our back door using LEGO, transformers and whatever else they could get their dirty hands on. We ended up finding those figures for years all over our back yard under the mulch. Enjoy yours!

Cool overall designs and wonderful trees!

Wow! Nice turtles with dark tan shells and sailing through the water! Your octopus sliding along the bottom is a cutie, too!

Cecilie, Wow! A very cool set and an outstanding review! Glad that someone has a buildable set like this because the rest of us can only read about it with Fabuland sets being so rare. Your comments left me rolling in bed laughing so hard...it's still early Sunday morning here, and iPads are made for reading in bed because they weigh less than laptops. Please keep up the funny comments...toys are supposed to make us LAUGH...so you get an 11 (out of ten points) for this review. And congrats on making it to both EB Gunzburg and BW 2013...that is impressive!

Thanks! Looks like Pepp and CopMike are on the way to seeing the Grand Six! As to the US Parks, a quick visit to FL or Californis could be combined with a BrickWorld trip due to frequent low airfares to and from Orlando all over. California is more distant from Chicago but still doable. And one can fly into Chicago, head to a Park, and fly home directly from the Park on a multicuty or stopover ticket. Maybe we have a travel agent member who can provide some sample fares incorporating tricks of the trade. You would most likely need to rent a car to get to the Park quickly from the airport, but advance reservations avoiding weekends usually are less than $50. a day. Go with a friend and cut your hotel and car rental cost in half. Legoland Malaysia (LM) is a bit trickier to reach for those of us residing outside of Asia and not rolling in the dough (monetarily wealthy.) The first choice is to use frequent flyer points; maybe you are incredibly lucky and can cosy up to a relative who lives on planes! If not (you are like the rest of us poor souls), subscribe to low airfare newsletters for alerts on Singapore (SIN) airfares. (Kuala Lumpur -KUL- is another nearby possibility.) One of the highest rated airlines in the world (Singapore Air) has dirt cheap fares from the US to Malaysia via Frankfurt at the moment...$1098US round trip from NYC, at least a third off normal fares. KUL is a one hr flight or seven or so hr bus ride (you get to see some of the beautiful country) from LM. But do be aware that it could take 36 hours or more one way to reach LM from The US....ouch, ouch! Get in shape before going and allow some downtime while there and after your return home if possible. And pity the poor souls from Asia and Australia....they have much greater distances to travel than most of us, so quit your whining, okay! Maybe we should get a travel savvy member to set up a Grand Tour of all six parks over two weeks...one day at each Park. Then ask Lego and Merlin, the park operator, to give away one package each year to EB members....woooohoooo! To reward us for our fanatical loyalty. At least dreaming is free! Any other extravagant ideas for making the Grand Tour?

Fred, I have the other three as well, CC, GG and GE and spares of each to expand them. I did not care for Market Street, and have not bought it even though I love the other three modulars. Even when I adore a line or theme, I only buy the sets that I really like. Not enough time or money or space to collect everything in the different themes that interest me. It does not make sense to me to buy sets one does not like in order to complete a theme, but I don't care if others do. I would rather buy two of the sets that really appeal to me rather than one of everything. And for many sets all I may want is a mini fig or two, if anything. So it is easy to purchase those on BL most of the time without getting stuck with a set that does not interest me but might have one minifig I crave. The only thing I wished we had bought is a spare of is the Taj Mahal because it is just so beautiful, and my son might want to build one of his own for their place. Otherwise I have bought most of the sets I really wanted. I have learned to buy those I like when they are introduced because we never know how long they will be on the market and available at the original prices. Most of us on EB have limited funds for LEGO purchases and have to learn how to enjoy what we have, which is not a bad idea. How many sets do we really need to make us happy? Certainly not everything that LEGO sells!

I recently read about a dozen books in Craig Johnson's fiction series, Walt Longmire, the sheriff of a tiny Wyoming town. The books were entertaining in their descriptions of the countryside and the colorful characters living in the area. Having grown up in a similar, blown away town, Pecos, Texas, it was easy to identify with the emptiness of the land and of the people as well. I later tried watching on netflix the first season made for TV by A&E, but feel that the books were much more descriptive and interesting with deeper plots and more stories. When I was in Target a few hours ago and saw the Lone Ranger sets, it reminded me of my childhood in West Texas and of how raw life can be in the vast, empty and windy West with tumbleweeds covering our entire house in a blanket of stickers in the gusty spring months. Sometimes we had to cut our way out the door using machetes to get through the tangle of tumbleweeds.

If this car got any hotter, it would explode! Way to go! (Segway Sam is cute, too!)

Doc, Normally its much easier to build rather than to upload photos of what you have built! (That's why so many of us non-geeks post so few photos on EB!) Good luck with flickr....it usually works. And thanks for so many photos!

coffee, Thanks for the feedback on the L Malayasia Park! Glad to hear that Miniland is stunning there, too. Can't wait to see it...

A 'bucket list" contains the things a person wants to do before he/she passes on ( as in dies.) Many EB-ers want to visit Legoland Parks during their lifetimes. Except for those of you who work for Lego or the Park Operator and have to visit the Parks as part of your employment, who has listed any or all of the Legoland Parks on a personal bucket list? It appears that there are six (outdoor) Legoland Parks in 2013: 1. Legoland Billund/Denmark 2. Legoland Deutschland/Germany 3. Legoland Malaysia (near Singapore) 4. Legoland Windsor/United Kingdom 5. Legoland California 6. Legoland Florida So if you have a bucket list with Park(s) on it, this is the place to share which ones are on your list, and why they are if you want to give some details Thanks! To start the process, my list includes all six Parks, and I have visited only Legoland Germany so far. Let's get rolling and figuring out where you want to go....so you do eventually get there!

Ace, Thanks for the info about Legoland FL. We do go to FL on business several times a year, so I should be able to visit fall or spring. But I would never go during the summer....it is just like an oven there most of the summer. Miniland is our favorite part of these parks, so that should be lots of fun. Your observation that there is a" pervasive sense of humor and whimsy" tying it all together is first rate. We noticed that at Gunzburg, also. If an adult does not have a well developed sense of humor, he or she may not fully appreciate the Park. These Parks are totally based on the imagination....the freer ones imagination is, the more he/she can enjoy and get into visiting the Park. We have a wonderful time playing with our toys and love being surrounded by fantasy themes; many of our friends would not. Thanks again for the helpful info about Legoland Florida!