Our Xmas Trip: Brick Live

This year we took our Christmas trip a little early and went to Brick Live at the Birmingham NEC.

Brick Live is a lego event that travels around the country and given than both my wife, myself and Snappy are Lego mad, I just had to take us. And I figured it was close enough to Christmas to make it our trip for the year.

We go on a trip every year instead of buying Snappy a big gift. He has enough stuff, and it’s just stuff. He probably won’t remember half the stuff he gets from one year to the next but he’s always going to be talking about his trips.

Especially this trip.

So Much Lego

Brick Live is a Lego building event and exhibition. I wasn’t sure what the expect really when I got the tickets, I knew there would be a lot of lego but not quite as much as there was. And not just lego to look at. Lego to build with.

There was so much to see and do. I had bought the full day upgrade and it was worth every penny. We actually left a little early because we’d been there all day and Snappy was getting a little tired and hadn’t been coping well with the excitement.

There were ball pits full of lego bricks, a red pit, an orange bit, etc and there were several building stations set up with trays of lego to build with. There was one with an airport and road mat, another with a world mat. One of the stations had Friend’s lego (where Bethend trued to build a massive slide and Snappy built a house made mostly of doors).

There was a Minecraft station, with consoles of lego games and Minecraft and Minecraft lego.

There was laser tag and an inflatable assault course; Snappy was way too little for that. And there were stalls selling Lego, and competitions, dancers, and master builders.

My favourite bit was the ocean displays and marble runs. The sea creatures were just outstanding, the squid was especially cool. And huge. The marble runs were a lot of fun.

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Building

Snappy mostly wanted to build cars, which is what is mostly wants to build as home cause he loves cars. We spent a lot of time building cars and it was hard to tear him away to look at other stuff. We managed to build a car and then he walked around with it for the morning until I bought him one he could keep and take home.

After that we went over to the marble mazes. Snappy really liked that and it was my favourite bit. They had set up marble mazes and also a medieval village and a construction site for marbles to run through. We were there pretty early so we got some good time with them. Snappy also liked running his car down them.

This is a video of the village marble run.

We spent ages building with the orange bricks. I built a bunch of shakers because I had so many bricks so why the hell not. Bethend made a garage/tower.

After lunch, we spent some time with the Friends lego where bethend tried to make a massive slide and Snappy took every single door he could find to make a house. Including the doors I was using to make houses. We did so much building we got lego thumb.

We bought some Minifigures as well as the car for him to take home. Security was not as tight as I expected – not that I expected to be stripped searched but there was simply an honesty box.

Aquarium

Despite the tears (his and mine), we all had fun. He’s a pretty good kid most of the time but he was overstimulated, and it was a long journey the day before. And he was fine most of the time but if you put him in a massive hall full of strangers and surround him with the one thing he loves the most and he’s going to struggle. He does need to learn to be a bit more grateful.

We also went to the Sealife Centre the day before. We hadn’t been since the first time we took home when he was four months old and it was wonderful to see him enjoy it in a completely different way. He made friends with a Penguin called Niffler who kept swimming up to see him. He really enjoyed all the tunnels you could go through but he didn’t like the big one. It was a bit much which is a shame because other than the penguins it’s the best bit!

They’ve recently rescued a couple of seals, and they were wonderful to watch swim around and then Snappy played with a little boy in the soft play for a nearly an hour which was a bit of a surprise. The little boy was lovely and wanted to play with everyone but Snappy isn’t normally like that but they made friends right away and played for ages. It was really sweet to watch.

Definitely a Christmas trip to remember and we’ll definitely be going to Brick Live again.