Legoland Windsor is about a 10 to 20-minute drive from Windsor. This picture taken at the top of Legoland looks over to Windsor castle in the distance. It’s a nice central location it’s easy to reach from most locations.  There have Lego themed hotels on site which look great but for a family of four on a budget, they are probably too expensive for most. We drove over to Windsor the Friday night before and stayed a little way down the road in a Premier Inn which meant we managed to get to the park just after it opened and were able to avoid the crowds for the first part of the Saturday. The Premier Inn was good value for money – we got a family room for about £50 and the children enjoyed the restaurant and all-you-can-eat breakfast in the morning.

Before travelling down to Legoland we read lots of reviews on Tripadvisor and watched a few videos on Youtube. We had rather low expectations, expecting to be stuck in crowds. In the end, we had a very enjoyable day and the crowds didn’t spoil it too much. We found the park to be well run with plenty of friendly staff and very clean and spotless.  As far as I could see all the staff walk around with litter-pickers and instantly pick up any litter they spot.   The toilets and catering facilities were all spotlessly clean which again is a great sign of a well-run establishment when catering for thousands of visitors a day.

Legoland has something called Q-BOT where you can basically pay extra to jump the queues that form around the most popular attractions. We started the day firmly of the mindset that we would not pay extra for this. However, as luck would have it the first ride we went on broke down and we were compensated with a couple of free Q-BOT tickets. These gave us the flexibility to do a couple of the most popular rides and spend the rest of the day having a leisurely walk around the park and enjoy some of the smaller simpler rides. In the end if you want to do one of the very popular rides where on a busy day the queue can be 80 minutes or more I do recommend buying a Q-BOT ticket so you can maximise the time you spend in the rest of the park.

My 6-year-old, 4-year-old and middle aged husband really enjoyed walking around the model village. We could have spent hours looking at this and playing on the nearby playground.  In fact, around the park, there are a number of nice playground / mini-adventure playgrounds which my children enjoyed more than the feature ride.

When it comes to value for money it all depends on how well you plan.  We planned well in advance and bought our tickets through a Tesco club card deal. Top marks to Tesco on this occasion for being very easy to deal with, friendly and helpful.  There are various deals if you look online, and I’d say the last thing you want to do is turn up on the day and pay full price on the gate.

We took sandwiches and bottles of water and enjoyed this is the picnic areas.  We had ice creams and coffee’s which was as you would expect more expensive than high street prices. A couple of medium lattes in Costa cost about £6 and sandwiches if we had bought them were about £3 a packet. So expensive but about what you would expect at a large theme-park.

We enjoyed that day. We didn’t see everything and so would certainly be happy to make a return visit one day.