If you read the post before this, you will know what I am talking about in this one. If you didn’t, I can still describe it to you, but for more in-depth detail go the the previous post. My dad and I just got back from San Diego, California, and we went there for the FLL Lego Robotics Open Championship, or just FLL Nationals. We had worked for eight long months for it, and now it had finally come. But this post is going to be more based on the LEGO part of the vacation, not what we did outside of it. I will definitely make more posts about that later. The first day of the competition was made more to familiarize everyone with Legoland, because many teams (like us) had never been there before. It was also mostly us just setting up our table in the pit, like putting up our presentation boards (project, core values) and putting away our robot so that we wouldn’t have to lug around the big suitcase with us all of the time. My favorite part of the day at Legoland, personally, was going to the place called Mini land. This was where they had made small recreations of famous places on the Earth, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower. They even made little ponds around some harbor cities, making them look like big lakes and oceans, and put LEGO ferries and boats in them. The only actual event that we had that day was one practice run for 10 minutes, which made all of the teams extremely angry. If you have such a huge campus, why not have some more tables and give us more than one go at it? At this point we had no clue that there were practice tables open, so we thought that this 10 minute practice was the only one that we were going to get. As it always does, the robot was messing up a lot of the missions that we were trying to accomplish at the competition. We only had a short amount of time to fix it, so we immediately got to working on it. After we finished troubleshooting, the day was over, and we went to the beach with my friends. Later that night I went to the hotel pool with all of my friends and we played there for around 2 hours. That’s all for today’s blog post. I hope you enjoyed this blog post, and feel free to stick around for more about this trip. There is also a lot more content all over this website, so feel free to check it out. Thanks for reading!
Our Trip to Legoland, California!
For the past eight months I have been doing LEGO Robotics with 5 of my friends. We have gone through regionals, state, and now, nationals at Legoland! We even received a letter from our congressman, Rodney Davis.
My dad and I just got home after the flight back to Chicago and the 2 hour drive back home, and we crashed right when we got home. But going back to the trip, when our flight landed in San Diego, we had to pick up our bag from the baggage claim and get our rental car for the four days that we would be staying there. Luckily, it was not extremely hot, because I had to sit outside for an hour until my dad could sort out the car we were getting with the agent at the counter. Finally, he came out of the building and told me that we got a pickup truck. At this point, I was bored out of my mind and I was really hoping we would get a nice car, but NO. He had to go and get the cheapest car. When we got out of the shuttle to the place with all of the cars, a nice agent who was asking us what we needed said that instead of a pickup truck, would you like a convertible? It looked something like this:
And my dad couldn’t have said no, because who would? First, we went to the beach and played around for a little bit, and then we went to our resort/hotel in Carlsbad, CA. We were right across from Legoland, and we didn’t have to stay in the overpriced Legoland hotel. None of my friends had landed yet, so we waited for a couple hours and then met up with them in our hotel. The first thing that we did was set up the presentation boards because we had our project and our robot design presentations on the next day. Even though it was just working at gluing and cutting out the slides, I still enjoyed working with my friends in a different place than usual. But it was getting late, and California time is later than ours, so we turned in for the night and went back to our own rooms. The next morning, my dad and I walked from the hotel to the Starbucks nearby, and we got a few sandwiches for ourselves (but that’s not important). When we were walking to Legoland, as it was right in front of our hotel, I saw the castle hotel and the rainbow hotel, but not actually Legoland! It turned out that it was in the middle of both of them, and the entrance was pretty small. That’s all for this blog post, but I will definitely write more about it. Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed the post I have many more here on this website. See you next time!
Our Trip to the Smokies!
My family always goes on a trip out of the city every summer break. And as we do a lot of the times, we chose to go to North and South Carolina to spend the rest of our break. A lot of our relatives live there, so it is always really fun in the Carolinas.
We left home at 10:00 AM on a Friday, but that was much later than we meant to. We were supposed to go at 8:00, but we had not prepared properly the other night and we had to do most of the stuff right then. When we finally had gotten into the car, though, it was really hot and sunny. We did a coin toss for the shady side of the car, and I got the left side. THE SUNNY SIDE. For some reason, I always lost coin tosses. But I had a towel and I used it to block out the sun from getting on me. Anyway, when we left I felt fine. I am mostly fine with car trips, but this one was really long and tiring. We had hardly anything to do and to make it even worse, it started raining really hard in Kentucky. We could barely see what was happening in front of us! There was also a tornado warning where we were.
And finally, after 8 hours of driving, we got to Gatlinburg, TN. We were staying at a log cabin instead of a hotel. What creeped me out was that we were staying on a mountain and they said that bears were common around there. In fact, we saw 2 bears in the early morning searching the garbage for food. Comforting, huh? But besides the cabin, the rest of Gatlinburg was very tourist-friendly and there was lots of entertainment. We went to some restaurants and we also went go-karting!!!!!! I had gone go-karting once before, but it wasn’t that fun because of all of the older and better people. However, this time, there were not as many people. My dad and my sister did it with me, so it was a lot more fun. I drove at the highest speed you could go and I got first out of everyone that was there. In fact, the only thing I did not like about go-karting there was that there was this kid who would not stop bumping into me.
After doing all of our sight-seeing (which was cut short by the rain) and go-karting, we went shopping at the outlet malls. Surprisingly, we had not been there for a long time before we left, but that was probably because all of the stores had already closed. But anyway, we were all very tired after all of that fun stuff and we had to wake up early in the morning, so we drove back to our cabin. The next morning, we packed up everything that was ours in the cabin and set off to North Carolina. That journey was not very eventful, but it was a lot better than driving 8 hours in the car. That trip was (only) five hours.
I would tell you about what happened in North and South Carolina, but I have not finished the trip yet. I hope you enjoyed that post about my trip to North Carolina. There will definitely be more about this soon! But for now, I have to go. Bye!