Tag Archives: travel

Miniland Wonders: Bonsai meets Legos

Can’t you just see the job description: ‘Lego builders wanted, must play well with others. Patience and math skills a plus.’

Without further ado, today’s blog is brought to you in pictures. All of the models are built from Legos. The trees and flowers are real but pruned to scale:

San Francisco, California

New England

New England meets Bonsai

Star Wars Episode IV: Tatooine

Las Vegas, Nevada

Historic Ferndale, California
(This one’s for you, Bonnie)

Not pictured: Washington, DC, New Orleans, New York and Southern California. There is also a Star Wars Miniland, featuring scenes from all six episodes.

Blending The Two
A. Bison
B. Golden Goose
C. Elephant near succulents
D. Bison close-up
E. Dragon tail

What’s Growing at LEGOLAND

Native Wildlife
(That lizard tried to impress me with push ups)

LEGOLAND: Our Miniland Sendoff

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We’re happy to be home with stories to share and a plethora of photos for the scrapbooks and Facebook. I love traveling but I’m happy to come home, too. I miss the garden and our cats and this time my husband and older son who stayed home. It was a great trip. We laughed a lot, shared some nice meals and enjoyed the novelty of a theme park based on Legos.

Our day drew to a close in the midst of the amazing miniature village known as Miniland, filled with incredible scale models of the real and the imagined. Here is a quick peak at Miniland from the top of the hill. More pictures to follow tomorrow.

Miniland: The Long View

LEGOLAND: Green Amid the Bricks

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We’re here in sunny Carlsbad for a few days visiting LEGOLAND California. My youngest son is 12, so this may be our last visit. He commented early in the day that he thought there would be more “mature people” in the park. Like me, he remembers the good times we had when he was younger. He’s been cutting his teeth on daredevil roller coaster rides back home, so finds the rides here rather tame by comparison. That said, it’s a wonderful place to bring children. Several rides are interactive, allowing the rider to participate. LEGOLAND is airy and uncrowded with several outlets for spontaneous creativity. Water figures prominently throughout the park. They’ve added a separate water park since we were last here, which we plan to explore tomorrow.

We’re traveling with friends who are easy-going and fun so we’re enjoying each other’s company. It drives the boys nuts when the moms stop to take photos. If you’ve spent time in the company of a 12 year-old you know that annoying them is easy. It’s an adolescent right of passage.

We took pictures anyway! Here are a few highlights of the day:

Miniland: Las Vegas, Lego Style

Tall grasses line the edges of the lagoon

Rock Concert: Singing Rocks
We will, we will, rock you!

Tasmanian Tree Fern ‘Dicksonia Antarctica’

Trivia for the day: 53 million LEGOs used to build models throughout LEGOLAND California.

Bellagio Botanical Gardens: Flowering Whimsy

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Charming Display Markers: Children's Clogs

It’s Las Vegas after all, a larger than life playground for adults. I expected over the top everything on my first visit to sin city, but was pleasantly surprised to find delicate blooms, charming displays, and happy children working their way through the Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens.

The Conservatory transforms five times a year, once for each season and a special display to commemorate Chinese New Year. The 2012 Spring Garden display is on view through May. Potent hyacinth were in bed with tulips, while mums lined the walkways. Larger than life wooden clogs housed flowers, with their miniature counterpart used as display markers to describe the scenes. I loved the bicycles, propped up against the landscape and the stunning floral reproduction of a Monet.

Bicycles at the Ready

The over-sized and somewhat silly swans seemed out of scale to the rest of the garden, but the artificial flowers and bees were fun. Whimsical hanging parasols had me mentally redecorating my bedroom at home. The overused catch phrase, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” needn’t apply to a beautiful set of floral parasols hanging from my bedroom ceiling at home. A gardener can dream, can’t she?

'Flapjack' Tulips

Chrysanthemum Ying and Yang

If only they were real

For My Room at Home?

Reminds me of me: I'm always the tall one in the bunch

I guess they meant "literally"

√ You can see some of the past Bellagio displays here.

√ For a time-lapse photo slide show of the garden installation click here.

Tea Time

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Lisa’s Tea Treasures is a charming tea room and gift parlor in nearby Campbell, California. Designed to resemble an early nineteenth century English parlor, they serve “high tea” in cozy rooms where you ring the bell for service. Fresh tea brews at your table in fine china pots wrapped in “cozies.” Lisa’s is one of my go-to places to celebrate with my tea-loving friends.

Table Top at Lisa's Tea Treasures

I acquired my love of tea from my British father who not only drank it, but grew it on a tea plantation in Darjeeling. I have an album filled with black and white photos from his time in India, carefully captioned in his neat print. It’s a beautiful legacy from the man who died when I was nine. I wish he were alive to fill in the details of what had to be an amazing experience.

According to Wissotzky Tea,

“Tea is an evergreen plant of the Camellia genus. Its scientific name is “Camellia Sinensis) and it originated in China, Tibet and Northern India. The tea plant has thick leaves, dark green in color, and a strong thick stem. The tea flowers bloom in white or pink and have a delicate fragrance.

There are about 200 different species of the tea plant around the world.”

Assorted Teas Available in Lisa's Tea Salon

We believe tea originated in China, still a primary source of the world’s tea, along with India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Nepal and Japan. Herbal “teas” aren’t really teas at all but a collection of flowers, stems, leaves and buds.

Visiting a tea plantation is on my proverbial bucket list. To see this plant, brewed and enjoyed the world round, would be a treat.

A few of my favorite teas:

Numi® Organic Tea: Super premium, organic and fair trade teas.

Celestial Seasonings: Sleepytime anyone?

Yogi Tea: Wonderful green tea.

Traditional Medicinals: I’m a huge fan of their Cold Care and Throat Coat teas.

Do you have a favorite?

Hide and Seek in the Garden

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I’m in beautiful Marina del Rey today, enjoying a long overdue catch-up with good friends. My room with a view opens up to sand, surf, seagulls, and last night, a duck next to the pool. Good times!

I plan to snap some shots of the local flora to share with all of you when I return. I love travel and time with friends as much as I love my home, my family and the felines that keep me on my toes.

Slinky and Lindy are still working out the order of dominance, hence this brief game of kitty hide and seek. I’m not privy to their private thoughts, but when I return they’ll have a story to tell, the subtext of which is “where have you been?!”