General ramblings on our Expo:
- We were doing 4 days in the Parks first since DW and I hadn't been to
Disneyland since we were kids. Had to do over again I would have just come in for the Expo, gone to the seaside somewhere to wind down afterwards and done the Parks on a separate trip. We had a load of fun on the trip but it ended up being a bit too much. Plus, since we were doing a Disneyland vacation AND the Expo, we didn't really have enough room in the luggage for stuff like folding chairs for the lines. I've done Cons before so I made sure to bring my heavily padded hiking backpack which could double as a seating pad, but three or four hours is a long time to sit on a pad at my age. Meh .. live and learn.
- Thanks to the experienced contributors on this board, we had a pretty good plan in place for each day. We were fortunate enough to not highly value any of the morning Hall
D23 panels so the super early mornings and/or overnights weren't part of our plan. We left our room in the Hilton around 6:00 am on all three days and managed to get to the show floor in a reasonable amount of time after 9:00 ... or right at 9:00 on Sunday. That gave us a pretty good shot at the shopping we wanted to prioritize first thing on each day, so we broke it down into three parts and hit the
Disney Store on Friday, the Dream Store on Saturday and MOG on Sunday ... all with maybe 5-10 minutes of waiting. We're not super into store exclusives, but even so we picked up a few Expo exclusive items which was fine. We hit the other retail booths (Uniqlo, Little Golden Books, Funko, Havianas etc) when we had gaps between other activities. We also had a good time browsing and talking to folks in the Emporium area ... especially at the Walt Disney Family Museum booth, which had a lot of people dropping in to hang out and say hello.
- The panels we wanted, we pretty much were able to get. My only regret was deciding to be dead sure about Parks on Saturday and sacrificing the Princess panel to do that. We ended up freezing our butts off in Hall E for probably an hour and a half more than necessary, but hey ... we got in, got decent seats near the middle of the hall and were thrilled with that panel. So I'm not complaining too much. Besides, if we were going to make the Princess panel it would have forced me to re-think the shopping plan too. Every decision you make planning these big Expos has reverberations. So ... panels. We hit the Mousequerade, Joe Quesada's Marvel talk and the Ink and Paint history of women in animation on Friday and loved all three. Cosplay at D23 was everything I had hoped it would be and the Mousequerade was tremendous fun. I'm a huge Marvel nerd and got to sit right behind the Sorcerers for Cup o' Joe ... that was great. And my DW in particular adored the women of animation panel .. me too, honestly. I'm a nut for Disney history. Saturday we hit the Parks queue right after we got our shopping and general floor wandering done in the morning. That panel was awesome and I thought the line management was pretty good in general. After Parks we headed outside for an early supper at the food trucks and to catch some sun after freezing inside all day. Then we went to the Evolution of Pixar's Characters panel upstairs at Stage 28. Super fun panel and a great way to end the day. After the last of our shopping on Sunday we hit the Star Wars model area and the Pirates Archives display and both of those were highlights of the Expo. That killed the morning and we went to the Hercules panel after a bite to eat. Munger and Clement are always fun and that was a blast. Then I went over and hung out at the DIS booth for awhile ... since I needed to at least say hey to my boss. We wrapped things up with the Maps of the Parks panel and then Legends of Imagineering. Again, a great way to end the day, this time with Tony Baxter and Marty Sklar (twice). More food trucks for dinner and then we waddled exhausted over to the Hilton and thanked our lucky stars that we weren't in the huge group of people grabbing cabs to LAX for a redeye flight back east. We slept in on Monday and took a mid day flight back to NC.
- Overall we tried to balance the Panels, the shopping and the big ticket displays and I thought we did a pretty good job. We're in our 50s so guerrilla panel hopping while eating exclusively out of your backpack is a thing of the past, and that was a good way to experience a wide swath of the Expo without feeling like we had to do absolutely everything. Like I said, my only regret is making too big a trip out of it. Next time we do a D23 it will be just the Expo and then a couple of days to unwind before we head back home.
