Star Wars Celebration V: Arriving in Orlando on Wednesday

The best part of Celebration V is having it in my home state of Florida. This was a major reason why I built the Wampa when I did, if this was in Chicago or any other location the Wampa may have never existed as we know it now. This also gave us the flexibility to leave when we wanted to. I work nights and we figured that if we show up a day early we could get everything ready that night before and be ready to go in the morning. Since I would have my son with us the first day, we figured we might as well have fun with it. So we packed up the Wampa in the family minivan and left Tampa Bay to Orlando.



Our first Star Wars experience actually started the day before when we stopped by Downtown Disney. Their toy store "Once Upon A Toy" has a great selection of Star Wars products from their die cast Racers to Mr. Potato Head parts. We were there for the make your own Lightsaber display. You can customize your own lightsaber or chose from unique famous sabers like Maris Brood's tonfa style lightsaber to Count Dooku's curved lightsaber for about $20. We got the infamous Darth Maul double lightsaber. The only Maul saber we could find for my son to play with was the Rubie's costume saber which says it is not intended for battle. The sabers at Once Upon A Toy not only hold up to the stress of battle, but they also light up via LED lights, have interchangeable crystals inside and make noise. You can swap out the parts too if you have more than one set!

Not your ordinary McDonald's food!

That evening we hit up the "World's Most Unique" McDonald's right down the street from the OCCC. Of course we got my son a happy meal but what makes this McDonald's stand out from the rest is their Bistro menu. We had tortellini, one with Alfredo and chicken, the other with marinara and meatballs. They also claim to have the world's largest Play Place. This was ridiculously huge and I could easily see how kids could get lost in this thing and drive parents crazy finding their kids.


Before we called it quits for the day we walked down to the convention center. We wanted to get a sneak peek and also judge the distance. We wanted to see if it was worth walking down there or taking the free shuttle the first day. It was a 20 minute walk down there and we got to peek in the windows and see the AT-AT and Wampa. We also found the R2-D2 parking barriers that were cute as hell. I kind of wish we didn't see some of this stuff because the anticipation built up by seeing what was inside made it hard to fall asleep. It was just like kids on Christmas Eve but eventually we knocked out.