Throwback Thursday: Disneyland Half Expo 2013

I'm getting so excited for the Disneyland Half Marathon weekend!  This time last year, I was still running my own personal blog, which I had originally created to keep me on track while training for my first Goofy Challenge.  I thought that would be the end of my running, but HA...not so!  So...in an attempt to psych everyone up even more, I thought I'd share my reviews (there are a few parts) from previous Disneyland Halves as part of a little "Throwback Thursday" mini-series!  Enjoy!

Original post: September 8, 2013: The Expo

Let's make this one short and sweet.  The expo was terrible this year.

Just a bit of the madness!

Okay, I'll elaborate.  I met up with my family, who graciously saved a spot in line about two hours before opening.  Yes, two hours, and no, we were not the first ones in line.  Both Katie and I were wanting a pair of the New Balance runDisney sneakers, so we knew we'd need to get there early.  That was the easy part.  My phone was dead from taking pictures, updating facebook, and tweeting all morning during the meet-up, so there was a little confusion, but eventually we all got our shoes and we were pretty happy.  Then we entered the runDisney merchandise booth.

It was a mess to say the least.  Black Friday at it's worst.  Hours and hours lost in line to get a sweatshirt.  I just wanted a stupid magnet for my car.  We ended up spending close to 3 hours waiting to checkout, and Billy didn't even get the shirt he wanted.  It really was ridiculous.

At this point, we were starving so we took a break for lunch to hit up ESPN zone.  I swear it was the best sandwich I ever ate (not really, I was just that hungry).  We still hadn't gotten our bibs at this point, so we had to go back.  We headed straight to pick up bibs, and...no Dumbo pin...what!?!?  I don't actually remember ordering it or not, since I usually just order all the pins available.  The real kicker was that Billy had one in his hand at checkout that morning and we almost bought it...almost.  Now we had to go back upstairs to brave the crowds one more time.  We ended up leaving it to chance and giving up for the day.  The pins are the one "thing" I collect from the runs, so I would have been disappointed if I didn't get one.  I was able to pick up a cute Dumbo shirt from One More Mile and some Bondi Bands for the races in November.

We finally made it back to our hotel around 4 to drop off our stuff and get ready to finally go to the parks.  In case you were wondering, we were able to get the pin on Saturday with a quick expo trip.

We tried to make the best of it...

I'm not sure what went wrong--too much hype, too many people making tons of profits on ebay?  I can only hope runDisney does something about this for future races.  Something as simple as allowing people to pre-order items or making an order form available for items they run out of would really help the frenzy.  I missed out on half a day at the parks to be frustrated at the expo.  Not worth it at all.