Brickworld

We took N2 to Brickworld on Saturday because we had seen a deal for it and thought why not?  We didn't tell them about it in advance but we did tell them that it is something they would really like.  Noah's first thought was something about space.  But then when we said it was something they both liked he thought we were going to see something about meerkats.  Can you even imagine a convention about meerkats?  We pulled up to the hotel/convention center and they were so confused.   We finally told them as we waited in line to get it that they were going to a Lego convention.

Some of the creations were truly amazing!  People clearly have way too much time and money on their hands!  But we are glad that they do so that we could enjoy their creations.  I really enjoyed looking at the cities that people built with trains running around them and seeing all the little humorous additions like a storm trooper waiting in line to see a movie with all normal lego people or monkeys climbing buildings or the Blues Brothers walking down the street.  I'm sure we didn't even catch a lot of what they had in their cities.  My favorite was the vegetation whereas Brian's was the architecture.  Natalie's favorite were the castles (that surprised me) and Noah's was the huge Saturn V rocket.  Here are some random pictures.

 In the picture below you can see Wall-e and Evie.

 The garden on the left is terraced.

This was the Chicago Lego club.  They created the Sears tower and this other Chicago building.  There were some other buildings from downtown plus a few just Chicago things.  They had a guy walking a tightrope between 2 buildings.

 This is the ghost buster's house (we saw lots of ghost busters cars and people) plus their car.  You can also see the Blues Brothers on the right walking down the street.

 This is a bank robbery.  At one spot there was a donut car accident right outside a Starbucks and the police officers were eating donuts and drinking Starbucks coffee.

There was a group that set up a different display each year.  This year they did around the world in 80 days.  They had different ports and had various sights from around the world.  I loved how they did the water-it was just loose blue transparent pieces-over 2 million of them!

 Petra is all the way in the back buried in the sand.

There was a group called the Great Ball Contraption.  They had created mechanical ball movers to get the small lego balls (soccer balls and basketballs) all the way around tables.  The tables could have fit on the outside of my house (at least across the back).  It probably took us 30 minutes to get around the tables to see the balls go all the way around.  It was really hard to capture pictures of the whole thing (you can google it and there are youtube videos on it).

 Groups can enter their creations into contests.  There are contests for best group layout, best ship, best train, etc.  There was also a category for artwork with Legos.  I found some of the artwork amazing.  I loved this tree.

When you look close up you can see so many different lego pieces in the tree.  The trunk was made up of Lego cows, horses and many other things.  The green part had all different types of pieces as well including a dinosaur.

Someone had made Sunday Afternoon in the Park using the one stud round Lego pieces.  It was impressive because it looked like pointillism.

What was really amazing about all of this was that pieces couldn't be glued together if they wanted to be considered for the contests.  They had to build it all and then transport it the best way they could (someone said they used hydraulics) and then put the whole thing together on sight.

 Here are just a few more pictures.  I LOVE that a couple people had Bob Ross minifigures!  There were also tons of Doctor Who minifigures and Tardis legos around the various scenes but I didn't get a picture of those for Brian.

There was a spot where kids could build-they had a duplo section and a lego section.  The lego section were just dark gray legos.  There was a guy who let people build fighting robot legos so N2 decided to do that.  They had 1 minute and 10 pieces to build a "robot" and then they put them on a track and flipped a switch at which point the "robots" went towards each other.  Natalie's pretty easily pushed Noah's off the track.

It was a really fun day-we spent the whole day there.  Noah was tired by the end because we had walked so much!