D23 2019 UPDATE 3/9 This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans, the end.

Well I'm back!!

And ready to start reliving the trip through my report.

So, did I manage to have a good time despite the whole reservation fiasco!!?!

Guess you'll just have to follow along to find out!
 
It's time to begin!!

It's time to play the music
It's time to light the lights
It's time to meet the cast on the D23 Show tonight

It's time to put on makeup
It's time to dress up right
It's time to raise the curtain on the D23 Show tonight!

Thanks Muppets!

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So the day had finally come. We were still a bit depressed due to the D23 reservation debacle, but we were trying to put that out of our minds. We had 2 and a half glorious days at Disneyland first!

Who knows why, but Brian decided he had to wake up around 5 am, even though we didn't have to leave to drop off the dog and head to the airport until 8:30.

I slept a bit longer but then it was time for some last minute packing and organizing.

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Poor Sirius was just trying to sleep.

I feel ya.

We could not find our fuel rod, which was super unfortunate because you can exchange them for free at Disneyland. But we had to go.

First stop was dropping poor Sirius off at the vet for boarding. The poor guy was not pleased. After that sad goodbye, we were on our way for the hour long drive to the airport.

Our flight left at 11:50 am. We arrived at the airport and got the car parked at the covered lot and arrived at the airport in plenty of time. We have TSA pre-check and there were 2 people ahead of us.

We decided to check out the sit down BBQ restaurant at the Kansas City airport.

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It was located on the second floor and had a little window where you could people watch.

The food also turned out to be delicious!!
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Pulled pork sliders and sweet potato fries?! Wonderful. Great start to the trip.

Finished eating, we wandered over to the Southwest gate. We had mid B boarding group and easily found two seats together near the back of the plane. The flight took off at 11:50 and arrived in Phoenix at 12:15 pm. There had been a non-stop available, but this would have required us to drop off Sirius the night before. I would gladly take a stop so the dog can spend another night with us.

We had a short layover and were in A boarding group for the next leg which left at 1:22 and arrived in LAX at 2:35 pm.

I like all the circles, kind of looks like a painting.

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And this view just made me think of Tatooine, which got me even more excited for my first visit to Galaxy's Edge.

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During the flight we read the first 3 Galaxy's Edge comics. These were great! The first one was just so so, but the second two were better and had some great character cameos. They focused on Black Spire and Dok Ondar who runs the antiquities shop on Batuu.

The flight was uneventful and we were soon getting our luggage.

We were going to take a lyft for the next leg of the trip. There ended up being horrendous traffic from LAX to Disneyland. We've been pretty lucky in the past and never had traffic this bad before.

According to the receipt, we paid $60 including tip. We were picked up at 3:13 and dropped off at 4:58 pm. I was getting pretty antsy by the end of the drive. The Disneyland anticipation was definitely building.

We were spending this first night at the Del Sol Inn. We'd booked our original hotel, the Sheraton, for Wednesday through Sunday night. However, after we were kindly invited to Club 33 and found out that lunch would be happening Wednesday, there was no way we were going to roll the dice with flights and fly in on the same day. So we added a night and found the Del Sol for $123 a night before tax.

Excellent price! If you didn't know, the Del Sol is right across the street from the Disneyland entrance. With a price like that, we were hopeful that the parks would be empty.

The red arrow is roughly the entrance to the parks. It was the closest we've ever stayed and I loved it! The hotel was clean and quiet and we even got chocolate chip cookies when we checked in! Can't go wrong with cookies.


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The room had a fridge and a microwave.

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Rest of pictures in next post since apparently I have a ten picture limit.
 
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Your "Muppet Show" reference reminded me that I always kick off Expo in Kermit Flail mode! AAAAAaaaaaahhhhh!

ETA: Did you see any Fuel Rod vending machines in the ACC or nearby? The closest one I could think of is in the GCH.
 
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Let's start the show!!! The Del Sol looks pretty good. Way better than we stayed at what is now the Grand Legacy and was the Ramada Inn Maingate.
 


Looking forward to any trip report that includes ME! (Hahaha!)

No, seriously, looking forward to seeing all the details of your time at D23 - as while we intersected at times, we probably did some pretty different stuff.
 
We got our chairs from REI, they were having a sale and my company gives us a wellness bonus each year. Up to a certain amount, they'll pay for half our outdoors/fitness equipment. And the chairs fell into that category.
Dh and I are following too! We've been wanting to go for a few years now and your tips will certainly help us plan!
I'll definitely have to look into the "Wellness Bonus" at work. They offer various benefits hopefully I can find something similar.
 
Your "Muppet Show" reference reminded me that I always kick off Expo in Kermit Flail mode! AAAAAaaaaaahhhhh!

ETA: Did you see any Fuel Rod vending machines in the ACC or nearby? The closest one I could think of is in the GCH.

That is a very good kick off mode. Kermit flail hahaha.

I did not see any fuel rods in the ACC.

Why eyes, I did sing along to the Muppets. :)

I had that song in my head for the whole day when I wrote that.

Let's start the show!!! The Del Sol looks pretty good. Way better than we stayed at what is now the Grand Legacy and was the Ramada Inn Maingate.

Yeah I'd stay at the Del Sol again. It's usually a lot more expensive than it was this trip, though.

Following along :yay:

Happy to have you :wave2:

Looking forward to any trip report that includes ME! (Hahaha!)

No, seriously, looking forward to seeing all the details of your time at D23 - as while we intersected at times, we probably did some pretty different stuff.

Hahaha, it def will have you. Though I'm not sure how much of the Club 33 experience I can talk about. I guess maybe talk about it all, but perhaps not pictures.

Yes, we can compare our Friday 'sitting in the basement' experiences 😂

Dh and I are following too! We've been wanting to go for a few years now and your tips will certainly help us plan!
I'll definitely have to look into the "Wellness Bonus" at work. They offer various benefits hopefully I can find something similar.

It's exhausting, but also a lot of fun. Especially if you forgo the bigger panels, it could probably be a somewhat relaxing, but still good experience.
 
That is a very good kick off mode. Kermit flail hahaha.

I did not see any fuel rods in the ACC.



I had that song in my head for the whole day when I wrote that.



Yeah I'd stay at the Del Sol again. It's usually a lot more expensive than it was this trip, though.



Happy to have you :wave2:



Hahaha, it def will have you. Though I'm not sure how much of the Club 33 experience I can talk about. I guess maybe talk about it all, but perhaps not pictures.

Yes, we can compare our Friday 'sitting in the basement' experiences 😂



It's exhausting, but also a lot of fun. Especially if you forgo the bigger panels, it could probably be a somewhat relaxing, but still good experience.

No you can share the club 33 pictures as long as there are no other guests in them. I will be sharing mine!
 
We breezed right through security and made a beeline to Disneyland. It had never been our plan to buy MaxPass for this day, since we wouldn't even be in the parks a whole day. We quickly discovered that we wouldn't need it anyway. The parks were dead. I'm talking, POTC 5 minutes walk on dead. I hadn't seen Disneyland this empty since our first trip, which happened right before Carsland opened.

We had been planning to head straight to Galaxy's Edge, but I became distracted by the lack of waits in my favorite land, Adventureland.

So first ride was a literal walk on to Jungle Cruise!

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It was a decent ride through. I liked the skipper better that we'd have later on in the trip, though.

Jungle Cruise is so my type of humor. We made our way through the rest of Adventureland and around the corner to POTC. The wait said 5 minutes, and no way could I pass that up. It ended up being another literal walk on.

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Pirates is just such quintessential Disney. The soundtrack, the smells, the boat ride, the animatronics. Love it. This is one of the handful of rides that would be very high on my 'if I could teleport onto any ride at any time' list.

Also couldn't pass up a ride on Haunted Mansion. This attraction would end up featuring heavily during the rest of the trip.

After that, we finally had to go to Galaxy's Edge. I'd been looking forward to it for a long time. The promise of walk on attractions couldn't delay us any more. We took the walkway back by Hungry Bear. Brian questioned if this was the right way. I mean...come on Brian. He should know better than to question my Disney knowledge.

I was careful to listen to the sounds as we transitioned from Critter Country to a different planet. I didn't take a lot of pictures at first, I just wanted to take it all in.

Turns out, the first picture I took was of some droids:

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I love Gonk droids. That's the fellow to the right in the picture above. They walk super slow and say GONK. They can be found in A New Hope.

We were a little early for our droid building appointment but we decided to duck in anyway. Pretty sure it took us about 10 minutes to find the place.

No harm in making us work for it, though. I was all about Animal Kingdom's original direction, which was...no direction. Rhode didn't want it to have any maps or sign posts. He wanted it to be about a journey of discovery.

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We finally did find the place. Turns out there was no line at all inside, and I don't think our reservation was very necessary. Once inside, I realized that the awesome gift cards were in stock. I told Brian we should buy one. You needed to put at least $100 on the card to be able to purchase. Since we were going to spend that much on the droid anyway, I thought it was a no brainer. Brian put up some fuss and was like...why should we buy a dumb gift card? Then once he saw it he understood and thought it was the coolest thing ever. It's actually very nice. It has a considerable weight to it and it came in a cool envelope. It's basically like a little free souvenir (free if you were going to spend $100+ anyway). Oh yeah, and you can use it all over Disney property. Brian took great pleasure in putting all our money for Club 33 onto it so he could use it in there.

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We got a short explanation and moved quickly to the conveyor belt.

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We knew exactly which droid we wanted. He was in the Star Wars Rebels cartoon. He was an Imperial Courier droid named 264. He helped out the Rebels and wanted to stay with them, except my beloved Chopper (the Rebel's droid) pushed 264 out of the airlock out of jealousy. 264 landed on the planet and was last seen living with the native Loth cats. Here he is:

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Problem is there were no black heads in the R4 type. Oh well. We could fix that in post production.

Here is what the build stations look like, this is where you went after you picked out your pieces. For our droid we needed the head, the body and two legs.

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While building you get to handle some nifty power screwdrivers. At least they seemed nifty to someone who doesn't usually use power tools.

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After your droid is assembled, you place him on this:

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I think I've heard of people getting to name their droids? But the CM working with us didn't bother. That's ok, we already knew his name is 264.

And a little jump into the future. We've got to work on him and are about halfway finished with his transformation:

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I'm having fun painting him. I wish the droids weren't so expensive, I'd get another and paint him to look like Donald Duck.

Ok back to the past!

They were out of droid backpacks so we had to carry him in his little build a bear container. Brian had to drag me out of the store and promised that we would think about getting him some accessories later. I really wanted to get him at least a blaster set. The store also had some Chopper merch, which I was astonished at. It's very difficult to find Chopper merch.

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Didn't know you were a "Rebels" fan. Probably my favorite thing to come out of the Disney/Lucasfilm era. (Well you could've probably told that I liked it by the fact I wanted a lothcat.) I didn't see the chopper merchandise in there. I might have considered that.

What do the droids actually do. Do they just roll around and beep?
 
Didn't know you were a "Rebels" fan. Probably my favorite thing to come out of the Disney/Lucasfilm era. (Well you could've probably told that I liked it by the fact I wanted a lothcat.) I didn't see the chopper merchandise in there. I might have considered that.

What do the droids actually do. Do they just roll around and beep?

Droids are RC controlled. BB models roll around, move heads, and make noise (all controlled from remote), in addition to doing those things and shaking in reaction to things in the land. My BB starting shaking in my bag and being noisy as some stormtroopers were coming by. I don't know if the R models are much different, but the Rs have a lot more accessories and customization.

With you on the loth cat. Rebels and Clone Wars are my families favorites.
 
Can we go back😫 Real life sucks!

I'm with you on that one.

Didn't know you were a "Rebels" fan. Probably my favorite thing to come out of the Disney/Lucasfilm era. (Well you could've probably told that I liked it by the fact I wanted a lothcat.) I didn't see the chopper merchandise in there. I might have considered that.

What do the droids actually do. Do they just roll around and beep?

Sonia already answered your question, but I'll just add in that having the backpack is pretty essential. The cardboard carrying cases were not that convenient, and you couldn't see your droid interact with the land. We are going to take ours back to WDW when we go in October. Now that we got the backpack, we'll see how it interacts with the land.
 
SO wait, it interacts with the land but then they don't let you take it out in the land?? Not sure what I think about that.
 

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