All good things must come to an end. This year (Dopey #10) marks my last Dopey Challenge as a Perfect Dopey. While I've enjoyed the races across the years, not only am I Disney'd out, I am beyond tired of waking up stupid early four days in a row to prepare and get to the races. 2am? Just...no.
As has been the case since I've been running Disney World races, the expo was at ESPN Wide World of Sports.
This year's banners out front, displaying what the medals will look like -- throwbacks to designs of the 90s (considering it's the 30th anniversary of the WDW Marathon):
I arrived a little before a planned 2pm meet-up, hoping to quickly get through bib/shirt pick-up in advance of the meet-up.
As it turns out, I met up with Laura and her family on my way into the bib pick-up area.
After being briefly celebrated as a Perfect Dopey when picking up my bib, prior to getting my bundle of six t-shirts, I picked up the gift that was awaiting me for my dedication of running all of the in-person Dopey races since 2014: a lunchbox with some swag in it -- two cookies, a baseball cap (embroidered re: Perfect Dopey on the back), and a $65 gift certificate for Otterbox.
After meeting up for a little while with much of Laura's runDisney & Fit Castle group, I headed off in an attempt to get into the official merchandise area. This year was the first year that they instituted a virtual queue for Day 1 of this portion of the expo, and, boy, was it an enormous cluster! The MDE app doesn't work properly on Android phones (it *always* crashed for me), so there was no way to try to get into the virtual queue. So, I set off to see if there was any way that I could get in despite not being part of the virtual queue.
After describing (and even demonstrating) what I was doing to try to get into the queue, they told me they could try to get me into the queue if I had my MagicBand with me to scan. Nope - I didn't have that with me since I wasn't planning on going into the parks that day. OK, do you have a QR or bar code that could be scanned in? Nope. After going around in circles multiple times, and eventually calling up in my MDE account (on their website, not the app) all of my previous 9 Magic Bands' codes, they took pity on me (since they couldn't use that info to enter it into their interface -- it *required* a QR or bar code) and walked me in past the checkpoints to enable me to enter the official merchandise venue.
Talk about the most perfect Disney quote ever.
After we quickly made our way down the hallway and through what is derisively known as the tape room (because it is just one huge room that has tape on the floor denoting the snaking line that everyone is to wait in before proceeding into the merchandise area), less than two minutes later we were on our way into the merch area.
I quickly made my way through the vast majority of the merchandise, quickly picking up my two traditional purchases: Dopey car magnet and Dopey pin, and wound up picking up a 5k and 10k magnet for Laura. While there was one shirt that I was inclined to get, considering it was only available in XXL, I easily passed up buying it.
In and out really fast, I made my way to the main expo area, outside of which they had their usual large markers on the ground that so many people wind up lying down next to for photos.
I met up once again with Laura and her family for a few minutes (handing over the two magnets), before heading back out to continue the rest of my day at Universal Studios. Given her son (Soren) and daughter (Isolde) a few more years, and they will surely be joining her running these races.
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