Continuing her trips to California’s many theme parks, Helen Raine takes the kids to Legoland for some brick-based entertainment... and a good soaking.

Combine one of your children’s favourite toys with all the fun of the fair and what could possibly go wrong?

I had the opportunity to ponder this question at length as my Lego log flume was hauled laboriously up a very steep incline with my five-year-old son and me in the front seats.

We rounded a tight corner, established that I was much more scared than he was, and then plunged for what seemed like several lunch-losing days down Treasure Falls, hitting the gigantic pool of water at the bottom. Hard.

There was a moment where I thought the ensuing tidal wave would miss us completely and soak the people behind.

After all, I was wearing my only dry clothes: a brand new, rather clingy dress. But somehow it lost momentum, hovered for a moment like a storm cloud right above us and then dropped.

Forget the ice bucket challenge; this was a swimming pool’s worth of the wet stuff falling from a great height.

But the fact that we couldn’t get any wetter turned out to be a bonus, because the second part of the ride involved hiding in a pirate fort with several oversized water guns to shoot all those people who had got off the ride and changed into the spare set of clothes that they had sensibly packed.

We got ’em good, to squeals of dismay, and my son ran off to the pirate reef, full of slides, buckets, swabbings of decks and lots more water.

And suddenly Legoland was fun. Because for a few moments at the beginning, it was anything but enjoyable.

Guests at the Legoland water park have a splashing time.

The problem was the sheer number of options at the admission booth. I could buy entrance to Legoland, the adjoining waterpark, SeaLife Aquarium or all three.

This sounds straightforward; it’s not. That’s because, like most other people in the queue, I had discount tickets that might actually make it cheaper to buy all three, or perhaps two, even though you only wanted to go to one, depending on ages, dates and, erm, shoe size.

It took ages for the poor cashier to work it out and so the entrance queues moved at a glacial pace in the hot sun and by the time I got in, I was feeling a tiny bit irritated (read: boiling with a murderous rage).

This was not alleviated by the fact that all the rides had queue times from the day before on them, which made it look like you had a good two hours to wait, when in fact, it was only a few minutes early on in the day.

I had imagined that somewhere inside, there’d be a giant Legotopia, with every mini figure you ever wanted just waiting to be played with. We never found it

Since it would be embarrassing to find myself having a meltdown in front of the kids, the family swiftly parted ways.

My two-year-old daughter went off with her grandparents to explore The Fairy Tale Brook (she was scared witless by a troll and spent most of the driving game parked in the middle of the track, unable to grasp the concept of the accelerator, before crashing into a wall), while the five-year-old and I hit the Pirate Shores.

Apparently, a complete soaking was just what I needed, because I quickly caught the Legoland bug.

We sailed on to Splash Battle. It broke down just as we got to the front, leaving hapless parents marooned in an aquatic Neverland, at the mercy of other boats firing their water guns, but the repair crews arrived quickly and we were soon firing ourselves on unsuspecting passers-by with impunity, which was more satisfying than it should be for a grown adult.

Feeling the need to dry out, we headed to Castle Hill where The Knights’ Tournament towers above the other attractions. It’s essentially six giant arms, with dragon claws on the end that will hold a young boy and his rather anxious mother.

They put him in what looked like a Kevlar jacket so that he wouldn’t slip out, the platform beneath our feet retracted and we were sitting in mid air, in a dragon’s clutches.

The claw began to spin, lurch from side to side, and in the case of adults, flip entirely upside down (mercifully, we were exempt from this part of the ride).

Racing on adrenaline, my son then joined the queue for the Dragon and I tried not to think about the ice cream I’d just scoffed as we hurtled round the track – and then did it again backwards.

On the way to reunite with the rest of our party, we passed through Miniland USA, where the States’ major cities have been recreated in Lego.

My son was utterly spellbound, particularly as we strolled into the Star Wars area, where a bazillion Lego pieces formed everyone from Darth Vader to the Jabberwockies, many of them taller than I am.

I can verify this because he insisted on taking a picture with each and every one.

Scenes from the film were reproduced in exquisite detail and we lingered for ages, looking at Tatooine or Naboo and wondering whether we could manage it with our mismatched Lego set at home. I’m guessing not.

Having relocated grandad with the very last of my phone credit, we had an astonishingly good lunch for a theme park (buffet salad) and used up the last of grandparental patience on the Aquazone Wave Racers (high-speed spinning on a sort of jet ski while water bombs exploded à la Hunger Games) and the Bionicle Blaster.

Surprisingly, we hadn’t played with a single piece of Lego the entire time.

I had imagined that somewhere inside, there’d be a giant Legotopia with every mini figure you ever wanted just waiting to be played with.

If there is, we never found it, but the children seemed perfectly happy with being soaking wet, and Bionicled out of their minds, so long as they got a Lego set in the inevitable exit gift shop.

And from this little playworld, we lurched out on to the freeway to the big, bad and very real world of Los Angeles. Quite a contrast.