Demosthenes said:
I know there has been a lot of concern about the fact that the park was not emptied of day guests, but we saw literally nobody without an arm band on. The lines for the character meet and greets, rides and candy were short, and they checked you for your armband before letting you go to any of those activities. I suppose some people may have stayed around for the parade and fireworks, and like I said previously, we skipped the early parade, but there were not large crowds for the fireworks, and the 2nd showing of the parade was deserted. I would ay that Disney did an excellent job of crowd control and general execution of this event.
We saw the 2nd parade as well...most areas were deserted, but we sat by the castle, and that was pretty busy. Of course, there was the whole "will they or won't they" with the Villains Mix & Mingle since they nearly did it right before the parade (but decided against it) and it was definitely going to happen (and did) after the parade. I think that contributed to that area's "crowdedness".
As for the wristband thing, I posted this in another thread, but I'll copy and paste it here....
However, our experiences with the whole wristband thing were very different than what the OP experienced. We were only checked for a wristband one time, and that was by a CM at a random location who commented on our costumes...let us walk past and then called out "oh, you had a wristband, right?" But before we could even show her, she just turned back around and continued doing whatever it was she was doing. So correction, we actually were not checked for wristbands. And before someone says she might have seen them on our wrists and that's why she didn't wait for us to show them...nope. There's absolutely no way our wristbands were visible unless we lifted our costume sleeves up for that specific purpose. We found most CMs at their checkpoints just chatting away with each other...no one checked anyone for wristbands anywhere from what we saw. We got to MK at 6:30pm...one side of Main Street was for people coming in and the other was for people leaving. We headed over to Cosmic Rays for a quick dinner and found PLENTY of people just sitting there without wristbands on. We also saw many of those same people in the park well into the party....getting on rides, sitting at the parade, etc. It seems like they knew to just hang out somewhere until they knew CMs wouldn't bother checking anymore...not like we were really checked anyway. In fact, when I was in line to get a
MNSSHP pin at the Expo Hall, there were 3-4 people in line without wristbands that were told "oh sorry, you need to have a wristband to purchase these." No comment about needing to pay for the party, no escorting them out...nothing. I was in line for the pin at about 10pm. I still had a blast and enjoyed myself thoroughly...really the only reason I was keeping a watchful eye is because I wanted to see how true to their word Disney would be about "rigorously checking wristbands." As I suspected, we saw CMs simply turn a blind eye. That's not to say that the park was overrun with people who stayed for free...most people did have wristbands. All in all, it was a terrific night and something I would gladly do again. It was just hard for me and DH to simply not say "I told you so."
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Hopefully I'll have a pic of us up soon. Wes went as Master Gracey with this gothic style Victorian suit (complete with top hat) and I went as a pirate (more specifically as Elizabeth Swann in her pirate outfit in POTC2).
