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.

Milwaukee LEGO Store - Grand Opening report

The building area.

Since I have talked so much about my experience leading up to the opening of the Milwaukee (Wauwatosa) LEGO Store, it only feels right that I give a little report on today. The morning started out hitching a ride over with some fellow WisLUG members, leaving Madison about 6:30 (ugh). We arrived at the mall about 8am and were thrilled to hear we would be able to reserve our store mini model sets so that we would be able to jump in on the volunteer work right away. This was a blessing and a curse though, as it pretty much meant we started working right away.

Part of the grand opening celebration is having kids help build an eight foot tall model of Spongebob Squarepants. To accomplish this goal, each kid (and some adults) would use a bunch of smaller bricks to make what are basically large 2x4 bricks. I believe the model was at 1:4 scale to the prototype. One large brick was equal to a regular sized brick in the prototype. Of course, this means tens of thousands of bricks are required to make the big guy. We started out the morning setting up bins at eight work tables and making sure there was enough brick on the floor to get us started.

Milwaukee LEGO store grand opening is here!

The big weekend has finally arrived and it's time for the Grand Opening celebration at Wisconsin's first LEGO Store! It's sure to be an action packed weekend for those able to attend and there are plenty of awesome gifts for those brave enough to wait in line and make a $35 purchase. Finding that much LEGO to buy is obviously not that difficult. It's the waiting in line that has me more concerned.

The giveaway schedule is a free t-shirt on Friday, the LEGO Store mini model on Saturday, and then the store-specific minifigure set on Sunday. Also note that Sunday is Mother's Day and you should be able to build a mini tulip in the store to celebrate. I'm not 100 percent certain that is available in every location though and they may not do it here because of the other events, but it is on the store calendar I picked up when I was there last month.

Milwaukee (Wauwatosa) LEGO Store now open

LEGO Store in Mayfair Mall

The grand opening is still a couple of weeks away, but Wisconsin's first LEGO Store is now open at Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa. The store had its "soft" opening this past Friday and is now chugging along as they work up to the grand opening the Weekend of May 11-13.

I will likely be heading over for the grand opening (possibly volunteering for the building event), but I could not wait until then. We drove over on Sunday and got to the mall about a half hour after it opened. The drive is just over an hour from our home and was fine until we got closer to Milwaukee. An accident and Brewers traffic slowed down the approach a little, but we still made decent time from Madison. Do note that there is ongoing construction along Mayfair Road. It's not too bad, but does mess up the traffic patterns a little.

Ribbon building event for Milwaukee LEGO Store

LEGO Store ribbon sets.

I recently joined the Madison-based WisLUG to try and connect with some other adult builders. We were graciously invited by the folks at KLUG to come help build sets for the new LEGO store opening this spring in Wauwatosa. We spent about 12 hours on Saturday building 60+ sets for the new store. We had about 15 adults working on the big stuff, while some of the KLUG kids handled the Hero Factory and smaller sets.

We started with the "ribbon" sets for the store. These are the permanent installation pieces that are present in just about every LEGO store. They all have high piece counts and are very colorful models that don't really follow any theme. I only saw a few that used mini-figs, with most characters and animals being entirely brick-built instead. Some of these were intense builds, but the finished products were very rewarding.