The end of My 30 adventures

My 30 adventures to celebrate my 30^th birthday have come to an end.  It might have taken 3 years instead of 1 but I finished it.  I started out with big plans, but before I even got started, I ended up in the ER for An unexpected adventure.

After this setback I had to re plan my adventures, but still had some fun adventures in Arizona and Utah.  

This included The 30th Annual Chandler Chamber Ostrich Festival

and Birdwatching in Gilbert, Arizona and Chandler, Arizona.  

In Utah the Red Butte Gardens Lego display in Salt Lake City, Utah,

“The Sandlot” movie tour in Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah 

and Ogden's George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park in Ogden, Utah.

After more unforeseen circumstances I had to plan and do more things closer to home. 

Like having Peruvian food and seeing the Ansel Adams early works display both in Longmont, CO 

and the Benson Sculpture Garden in Loveland, CO.

However, before I got all of these done Covid hit, and I had to go virtual and do the rest from home.  This included watching 30 movies I hadn’t seen, 

building a Lego Christmas tree  and seeing Keukenhof garden in the Netherlands.  

Then I finished with my Virtual Road trip.

 

My adventures never went as planned but I was able to see and do things I didn’t expect. I’m glad I didn’t give up and made it all the way to the end.  Thank you so much for reading and following along, I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did! 

If you want to continue reading my posts, I have another blog Ryan’s Good Eats that you can check out.  I don’t know what my next big adventure might be but I’m looking forward to seeing what life brings next!

# 28 Chinese New Year

 This year I decided to celebrate the Chinese New Year!

I started out by reading about all their new year customs at the chinesenewyear.net website and found out about some things that are lucky and not what they eat to celebrate and where certain people are supposed to sit.  I also read about the year of animals I’m a dragon and this year is the year of the Ox.

Last year and this year I ordered some Legos, and they came with a free year of the rat set 2020 and a Free year of the ox set 2021.  So, I had to make sure to Build the Rat on New Year’s Eve since it was the last day of the year.  

Then we Built the ox on New Year’s Day since it was the first day of the year of the ox.

 

On New Year’s Eve we also ordered Chinese food from a local restaurant Asian Pearl Bistro.  

We ordered various Chinese dishes including egg drop soup, kung pao chicken, chicken lo mein, chicken with snow peas, with fried rice and some dumplings which are something special they traditionally eat for New Year’s.  Most of the food was pretty good and we had a good variety of food.

With our order came a couple of red envelopes that were just supposed to be for dine in only, but they were in our delivered box.  Each one contained a dollar bill which is a traditional thing to give as gifts in china

We ordered too much food, so we had plenty of leftovers the next day

 

Then a few days later I watched a virtual tour of the great wall of china.  The video I found on YouTube was a 30-minute video that was someone’s video that they took while walking along the wall.

 

This was really neat to see.  I liked when they turned around and you could see how far you’ve come and see how long and high the wall is.  The little indoor places and towers were interesting with the arched doors and windows.  I liked seeing out from the wall, seeing the trees and mountains although it was a bit foggy in the video.

 

Reading about Chinese new year traditions, building the Lego sets, having Chinese food and taking a virtual tour of the Great wall made for a great adventure that I really enjoyed.

 

https://chinesenewyear.net/

#25 O Lego Christmas tree

This past Christmas I decided to build my own Christmas tree out of Legos.  The previous year I made a small tree, but the branches were not very strong.  So I wanted to make a larger and stronger tree.  First I started by testing a couple of branch ideas and came up with a design to have different branch layers with 4 branches, one going in each direction but still connected together. For the branches I had to take standard bricks and then put a layer of flat bricks on each side. This basically made a sandwich and made pretty strong branches. Then I had to build the brown tree trunk around the branches. Underneath the tree I made a pretty solid base and built various different color and sizes of packages/ supports.  Then we found various Legos; clear, colored, round, squares to decorate the tree.  By the time I was finished my tree was 30 inches tall and I used about 2,100 Legos

This was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. I can’t wait to start my next bigger and better Lego project which might possibly be a saguaro cactus.

# 24 Lego flower pictures

A while back I saw a Lego display and previews for another that had pictures made out of Legos.  These were of famous paintings and far more advanced than I could do, but this gave me the idea to do something similar but way more simple.  This turned out to be flowers.  First I had to check out my Legos to see what colors and shapes of each I had so I could know what I could make. Then had to find pictures of flowers or simple cross stitch patterns.  Next I made customized cross stitch patterns on Stitch fiddle.  Then I had to get Lego plates of different sizes depending on the size and shape of the picture, so mostly 16x16 plates.  I had to try to hook the plates together as well as I could.  And then I put the Legos down according to my patterns.  On my last two the tulips and the sunflower I put a layer of thinner Lego plates under where I wanted the flowers to go to raise them up above the background. 

Columbine (Colorado state flower)

 

Hibiscus 

 

Luther rose

 

Tulips

 

Sunflower

This was a fun adventure!  I started out not knowing exactly what I was doing, but I kept learning from each picture.  Now I know a lot more about how to make these Lego pictures and can’t wait to make bigger and better pictures.