LEGO Store at Downtown Disney, FL

In mid-June, our family took a much needed vacation to Florida and spent a week at Disney World. We went with my parents, siblings, and their families, giving us 10 people moving through the various parks for several days of fun. It's about a 3,000 mile round trip from home, so we took about 10 days in all for the whole trip. It was exhausting, but fun.

Now, what does this have to do with LEGO? As you are probably aware, Downtown Disney in both FL and CA have large LEGO Stores on the property. VERY large stores. We took a break one afternoon to pay the one at WDW a little visit. I wanted to see the displays and maybe do some shopping.

Let's start with the sculptures. They are amazing and enormous works of LEGO art. Pictures just can't do them justice. The first one you see is the very large Brickley out on the lake. His head and body segments are poking out of the water in several places, which is a nice touch.

Also outside were displays based on Snow White and Toy Story, but my personal favorite was the battle scene based on Sleeping Beauty, where the knight on horseback is taking on the giant black dragon on the rocks. The size of this is truly impressive and the details just pop out at you. I'm highly tempted to try to recreate this in mini-fig scale. I wish I'd taken more reference photos, but a storm was coming in and there was more to see.

The inside of the store itself is just huge. If it's available in the US right now, LEGO has it here. The Pick A Brick wall is easily five times the size of anything I've seen in a regular store and had a huge selection. Sadly, there were no exclusives to be had in the store, outside of the mini-Sopwith Camel with $75 purchase.

Most major sets have a retail display set up and several large models dominate the area. My personal favorite were the life-sized Woody and Buzz in the center of the store. There are multiple build a fig stations, but all of them had the same stock. It looked like the series three fig parts that are in most stores right now.

Just outside one set of doors is a small creation area, where kids can build up there own little models. I did not venture out there, as my wife took my daughter off to shop elsewhere so I could have some time to explore. Seems like a fun thing to do though if you want to let the kids run loose a little.

Now, despite being in LEGO heaven, I somehow manage to avoid actually buying anything. I did not have the time to fill up a PAB cup properly and recent sales have just spoiled me on paying full retail for sets. If I'd seen anything exclusive to the location, it probably would have been a must buy. However, all I left with were pictures from the visit. Honestly though, that's probably the best souvenir I could ask for.