Chapter 123
I’m Among My People

August 9, 2013

We woke up around the same time on Friday morning as we would if we were going to work, and then we got ready as quickly as possible. Realizing that we weren’t about to beat the crowds (since people had already started showing up the previous evening), our goal was to try to get in line and make it into the Expo sometime during the extra hour for D23 members. Incidentally, we had only signed up for the free version of the D23 membership, but that still made us eligible for early entry. I don’t know why every single attendee didn’t take advantage of that opportunity, but I guess I’m glad they didn’t!

Having heard from Guy that the best place to park for the Expo was the Toy Story Lot, that’s where we headed. Parking was a breeze (and it was free with our APs), so we were feeling pretty good. Until we saw the line.

Okay, that picture does a terrible job at showing how impressive this line was, but here’s how far away we were from the convention center when we got into line.

We knew it was going to be a while. Sitting on the curb and eating the first of my morning snacks, what we really wondered is why our line literally didn’t move until 9:45 even though early entry had started at 9:00. I think that they had just let in everyone who was in the line’s switchbacks before letting us move at all, which is why it took so long for them to get to us, but it made us a little nervous that we might have gotten in the wrong line.

While we waited, we started to see the first signs of cosplay people.

Some of the costumes we would see today were EXTREMELY impressive. Man, it takes some serious commitment to show up the Expo in costume. I could never.

As our “early” hour drew to a close, our section of the line FINALLY started moving.

I was amazed how long it took to wind through all the scansions they had set up, but eventually, we saw these lovely banners welcoming us into the convention center!

We tried to navigate through the lobby—still not sure exactly where we were supposed to be going.

Finally, we found the show floor.

And what an awe-inspiring sight it was. That convention center is one of the most massive rooms I’ve ever been in. It seemed like it was never-ending. We wandered around the whole floor for a few minutes just reveling in the sensory overload and trying to take everything in.

Making our way back to the section of the floor where third-party vendors had set up shop, we saw that everyone around us seemed to have these lightsaber balloons from Party City.

Tracy and I got some.

The next area we happened to wander through contained all the parks memorabilia up for silent auction. There was a carrousel horse.

An old Matterhorn bobsled.

This sign from Autopia.

Also, some hunny pots from Winnie the Pooh.

Obviously, these auctions were a LITTLE rich for our blood (I don’t think anything sold for less than a few thousand dollars), but we still dreamed of being able to bid.

Our first actual planned destination was to be the WDW Radio/MouseFan Travel booth. Always devotees to whatever Lou does, we were excited to finally see the whole setup from outside of “The Box.” At first, we had trouble finding the booth because we didn’t know what to look for. Later, however, we realized that all we needed to do was seek out the giant balloon replica of the Disney Dream!

Has there ever been anything more impressive made out of balloons??

Lou and Beci were broadcasting live, and the rest of the WDW Radio crew was with them.

This was actually the first time we’d ever gotten a chance to meet Beci in person (although we’d communicated with her via email after we won the WDW trip from her last year). I still feel a little “starstruck” meeting these types of Disney people who I’ve listened to on hundreds of podcasts.

One thing the WDW Radio booth had—which was SO welcome after more than an hour of being in line—were chairs for us to sit in! We took a load off for at least 10 minutes, watched Lou and Beci broadcast live, and tried to figure out what on earth we planned to do at this Expo.

Here’s the thing—I had downloaded the D23 Expo app about two weeks in advance and added all the panels and other events I thought sounded cool to my calendar. I’d say that we probably had at least 15 different potential panels to think about attending between the two days. We had been warned by the gathering at the meet-up the night before, however, that realistically, you can probably get to about 1/3 of the total events you want to attend at the Expo. Add onto that notion the fact that we needed to explore everything there was to see on the show floor PLUS our desire to at least spend some time hanging out at the WDW Radio booth, and we really didn’t know where to start. Our attitude before actually arriving at the Expo was that we would see what we could but mostly just enjoy the atmosphere. Now that we were here, however, we wanted to see and do EVERYTHING. And we only had two days to do it in.

We had added several events to the calendar for this morning, but we had already abandoned several as well. Obviously, we were on the main Expo floor, so we weren’t attending the big arena presentation, Art and Imagination: Animation at the Walt Disney Studios. What we gleaned from checking the schedule is that you basically have to either commit to seeing the arena presentations or experiencing the rest of the Expo. Obviously, that’s not ENTIRELY true, but it might as well be. If you spend that many hours waiting in line for the arena events and then each of them are at least two and a half hours, it doesn’t leave much time for you to do other things.

The other panel I had on our prospective schedule this morning was Behind the Scenes of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins. While we would have loved to hear Dave Smith taking about one of my all-time favorite movies, it would have taken up pretty much our entire morning.

Instead, we decided not to do any panels in the morning, but we DID want to make sure we attended something in the afternoon. We went to get our first StagePass for the event we’d picked for later that day—Undiscovered Disneyland (hosted by Tony Baxter).

As we arrived in the StagePass line, they warned us that this particular panel was proving to be VERY popular, and they couldn’t guarantee the passes would still be available by the time we got to the front of the queue. We cursed ourselves for waiting too long.

But hey, at least we still had our lightsaber balloons…

We waited anyway, and when we got to the front of the line, the event was still saying it was “Distributing.” We allowed ourselves to hope we might just make the cutoff.

In the end, I think we got one of the last 10 StagePasses. We saw the single sheet of them remaining when we got to the front. We were SO EXCITED!

I think StagePass is an AWESOME feature to have introduced to this year’s Expo. The fact that it guarantees you seating to at least a few select panels without you needing to camp out hours in advance allows you to do so much more at the Expo than I’d heard people were able to fit into previous years.

At this point, I think it was about 11:20, so we had and hour until we had to head over for this panel. In the meantime, we went back out onto the show floor.