Legoland Florida

Old news, perhaps, but I saw this in last Sunday's travel section of the Chicago Tribune. (It takes me a while to find the time to read the Sunday paper, so I don't see stuff like this till late...)

Legoland Florida plans on opening its gates in late 2011. Merlin Entertainment purchased the Cypress Gardens theme park for the reported amount of 22 million dollars. The park is a 145 acre property, and is located about 1 hour southwest of Orlando and Disney World. (The article says it's about 40 miles from WDW.)

They are apparently aiming at kids ages 2 to 12, and this will be the fifth Legoland in the world, and the largest, with around 50 rides, shows and attractions. The article also states that they're going to do a multi-million dollar expansion of this property, and turn it into a multi-day resort, promising to add hotels and attractions from its other holdings. (Those holdings include Sea Life aquariums and Madame Tussauds wax museums.)

22 million doesn't sound out of this world for a 145 acre chunk of real estate, presumably with some infrastructure in place for the Legoland park, but then again, I don't know what Florida real estate is worth these days. (I know it's depressed.) I also don't know much about the town of Winter Haven, which is where this is located.

I tried to find the article online, but found this longer more detailed article instead.

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Animal Kingdom Lodge In!

Well, one thing goes down, another comes up. This morning I called and booked our stay at Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge for Thanksgiving week, 2010. We'll be staying in a savannah view room at the Kidani Village section.

We will be certain to eat at Jiko and/or Boma on this trip. Maybe we'll go for one of those on the day of our arrival.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the Osborne Family Light Festival at DHS, and perhaps we'll do the Magic Kingdom ticketed Christmas party too. I don't know what the weather is typically at that time of the year but I'm given to believe that it's pretty good yet; that later in December, January and February are the months that are less predictable. I'm hoping for a still-temperate but not blazing hot week.

Still looking for something to do over the 4th of July.

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Hilton Head out

Well, it looks like there won't be a DVC Hilton Head vacation this summer.

The first roadblock was the airfares. It's a pretty big chunk of change to fly from Chicago to Savannah, or even to Charleston. The savings to fly to the further away and presumably bigger city were not enough to justify the 2 to 3 hour drive from there to the Hilton Head Resort. But we had pretty much talked ourselves into doing it anyway.

So this morning, we called DVC to try to book. Bad news. No availability at all for the week that includes the 4th of July.

This is just about 5 months in advance. As a DVC owner with no points at Hilton Head, we can book as early as 7 months in advance. I have heard recently that HH is a hard one to get into, since it is relatively small compared to other properties.

Oh well. On to plan B, or C, which will apparently not involve DVC points. Might be banking more of them next year.

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Museum of Science and Industry Visit

We love going to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. It's sort of like going to Epcot without the thrill rides.

They have redone their human biology section and called it "YOU! The Experience" or something pretty much like that. It was chock full of interactive exhibits and games for the kids to try. It was their favorite of the sections we visited yesterday. They have a few "cut-away" dissections of human bodies on display; these remind me of the Body Works special exhibit that I never really wanted to go see (and didn't). Everything is a video game for kids these days. Oh well... Still, this was a really interesting, well done reworking of their old classic exhibit.

The special ticketed exhibit that was open at this time was their White House exhibit, with a bunch of memorabilia from White House functions through the years, and a history lesson to boot. The most interesting thing, to me, was the miniature version of the White House itself, where the rooms are accurately depicted in the White House proper and the East and West Wings. Tons of detail to look at in this model, where the front was a closed model and you'd have to look through the windows, but the back was cutaway so that you could look into the various rooms. Much of the memorabilia had a focus on the four presidents who lived in Illinois: Lincoln, Grant, Reagan, and Obama.

The IMax show that we got to see was titled "The Human Body" and was a very well done, very educational film depicting the systems that make us "alive" in huge detail all around the viewers. My wife and I liked it a bit more than the kids, but we all thought it was interesting.

Another exhibit that I don't remember seeing before was the Art + Science = Architecture exhibit. In this one, an architect who has become a Lego artist has built several of the city's and the world's tallest buildings, as well as some planned buildings. The Lego models are displayed here along with facts about the buildings.

We finished our visit to the museum with the obligatory watching of the Swiss Jolly Ball exhibit, where a steel ball rolls through its paces on a track that takes it through buildings, up an elevator, on a ship ride, on a trolley ride, and along a bunch of track. For some reason kids (mine, and others) find this contraption mesmerizing. I referenced this pinball machine in one of my posts on things to use to fill an amusement park. Click the link above if you'd like to see a picture of it.

All in all, a very good day at the MSI.

DVC - Hilton Head Resort

We're looking at a vacation to this resort in Hilton Head. It looks like it could be a fun trip. The resort itself has the standard DVC style accomodations: studios with queen bed and pull out sleeper (our likely choice), one and two bedroom villas, and of course the 3 bedroom Grand Villa.

In the area, besides the Disney hospitality and activity that I suppose the resort will offer, we can do the beach, take a tour to Savannah or of Beaufort, or go on a dolphin cruise. Actually I sort of relish the idea of maybe just spending some time lounging by the pool or at the beach, eating leisurely (as opposed to rushing from attraction to dining reservation back to attraction), and generally kicking back and relaxing. That's something we haven't done on vacation too much - just relax. Who knows? We might enjoy it!

If we book this, we'd be going at their busiest season. And right now it's looking more like we'll be going than not. It isn't a visit to Disney immersion, but it's a little Disney with a little culture and history and a little nature. Works for me.

Wrapping up the Theme Park series

Okay, so now I've basically reinvented the wheel. I've talked about different categories of attractions we might use in a theme park. I've talked about the secondary things we might see if we can incorporate, detail oriented stuff. I've talked about circulation patterns. And all of it in much less depth than I'm sure you can find elsewhere, especially a site like Themed Attraction.com.

It's fun to think about this stuff, and you have to walk before you run. You have to crawl before you walk. And you have to open your eyes and wave your arms before you crawl. I suppose one could say that all the previous posts fall in the "opening the eyes and waving the arms" stage.

I have some ideas, but I would need a lot of help putting them into tangible form. Mostly I need help on the concept art. I try to draw stuff, but my drawings just don't convey the excitement I visualize. Maybe it's because I can't draw people for the life of me.

Anyway, I have pretty much exhausted my thoughts on the topic for now. So for the time being, no more posts on the subject(s). From time to time, however, I will probably post something on theme park design when something catches my fancy or bubbles up to the surface in my thoughts. I'm still thinking on this, and I really would like to do it someday.

So...back to Disney. We're considering two trips this year - one to DVC's Hilton Head resort, and the other to WDW, possibly over Thanksgiving. Our last Disney vacation was one year ago (we were in the air at this time last year - the Saturday before Martin Luther King Day), and we did spend a couple of days at the California parks in April. I'm ready to go back.

Circulation Patterns

An important subject to consider when laying out our park is the way the guests are going to walk through it. Is it too early to start thinking about this? Heck, we haven't even discussed what the theme of the park is. (And I'm not entirely sure we will..)

Well, I don't think it is too early to at least consider the circulation patterns of the park, at least superficially. It was one of the first things Walt thought about, whether he did it consciously or not. We all probably remember seeing images of the "back of the envelope" sketches Walt did of a possible park near his studio, and then of course as the project grew, the sketches did also, with added level of detail and thought going into them.

Disney, of course, settled on a "hub and spoke" pattern, where people enter the park, walk toward the central hub down the "spoke" that extends to the entrance/exit of the park, and finally end up in that area, where they can make choices on where to visit first. Along the outside edge, it's sort of an incomplete wheel. You can enter into Adventureland, and you can make your way to Frontierland from there. You can then go into Liberty Square, then into Fantasyland, then finally into Tomorrowland. The soon-to-be removed Toontown is a sort of dead end, though there is a train station down at that end. From Tomorrowland or Adventureland, it's back to the hub.

Six Flags Great America uses a loop, of sorts. You come to their carousel, then you either go left or right. You traverse the loop in either direction. There are some cross-connections, but generally speaking, you have to walk all the way around the loop to get to attractions located on the opposite side.

Epcot has sort of a hub in Futureworld, with its spokes extending to Futureworlds East and West (right directions?), and to the loop that makes up World Showcase. Animal Kingdom is a bit more complicated. I think it's basically a hub and spoke design, but because of the vegetation, it's hard to visualize it. DHS is also hub and spoke, with less connections between the areas. You can't get from the Tower of Terror to the Pixarland without going back through the hub.

In an outdoor park, I think the hub and spoke design is likely the best, but I think a loop with lots of cross connections could work well too. I suppose if you cross connect things enough, it almost becomes a hub and spoke layout. In an indoor park, I was thinking of something that I'll call the "butterfly" design. Basically this is a central area with loops on either side. It gives the guests choices on where to go, and then brings them to their choices in a pretty ordered pattern. It would work pretty well in a limited space.

I was thinking about malls in relation to this, thinking that they might be good models for circulation patterns in an indoor park. Our local mall is sort of a linear mall, with anchor stores at either end of the line, and four branches off this main drag. Two of those branches have anchor stores at the end of them, and two exit to the parking lots. A layout like this isn't bad. Take away one of the anchors, and make that your park entrance/exit. Then have your lands at the ends of those branches. This wouldn't be terrible for an outdoor park. In fact, it's almost a hub and spoke design!

Another is sort of like a tree. You come up the trunk of the tree, and the branches (paths) fan out from that trunk. In the back of the park it's quite wide, and a lot of stuff could fit back there. As you go out the branches, they sort of circle across the "top" of the tree and the left paths end up joining to the right paths. Of course, you can always go back down the center. Again, if the trunk is thought of as the hub, the branches as the spokes, it's not that much different.

All of these designs assume a single entrance/exit. On Themed Attraction.com, there's an article discussing a meeting between some of Walt's representatives and some amusement park bigwigs, back in the 50's. They suggested that you'd need multiple exits for any park, but Walt and most every big amusement park since proved them wrong. Would it be a bad thing to have multiple entrances? I think it could be a good thing for a larger outdoor park. For an indoor park, one way in and out is sufficient, it would seem. I don't know what Walt's reasoning was, to limit it to one way in and out, except that it gave them a level of control for the least amount of money.

When we're sketching the layout of the various attractions in our park, we'll probably try that "butterfly" approach first. And see where we go from there.