After a really long and busy week at work, I left the office at 5pm to drive to Orange County to go to my first Disney Vinylmation Trade Event at Downtown Disney. It took an hour and a half in the car but I got there in front of the store at 8pm. The event ended at 9pm so for a while there I was thinking I had driven to the OC for nothing but alas I arrived (hubby was coming behind me in his own car) and I had no idea what to do. So I started talking to people. Traders had all their extras beautifully displayed in little plastic bags. Mine were all jumbled inside a big canvas bag. The first lady I talked too basically wouldn't trade anything. Well, it was hard to trade with her because she had everything so there wasn't anything I had she could trade. She was basically looking for some really rare stuff.
So I moved down the line and ended up talking to the guy who set up the event. I traded 3 vinyls for a Woody and another chaser.
I kept moving down the line and making trades until my pal Tony "McDuck" (He loves anything about Scrooged McDuck) showed up. I hadn't seen Tony in years but we keep in touch over Facebook occasionally. He had seen my Hong Kong post on Facebook the previous night and called me at work and said he was at Company D, the discount store for Disney Employees. He said they had vinyls 50% off meaning that they were $5 bucks. So I had him pick up $40 worth. The key to collecting is getting cheap stock so you can trade with others. That way you can get rarer ones for 2-3 vinyls. The tradee doesn't know you paid $4-5 bucks for your stock and that way you as a collector keep your prices down. I had had Tony buy me 4 Toy Story's, 2 Urban 4's and 2 Cutester 1's. By the time he showed up I had traded 5 Toy Story's to complete my collection so I have extras to trade now. Then the 2 Urban's which they don't make anymore I opened and ended up trading them in the trade box at D Street Store
and we got two news ones. The Cutester 1's I hadn't gotten so those were new. I am afraid Tony saw me with my crazy Disney Face and not to mention I was in the middle of trades so I didn't get to talk to him as much as I wanted too. He called me a nut and I am sure he was right. People kept saying all night they had never met a person who was so happy. I did feel like I had a big Ronald McDonald grimace on my face all night. I was pretty happy as I was euphoric from trading. By the time hubby showed up I had a bagful of loot. The cool thing about trading was that the event didn't end at 9pm, it kinda kept going and we stayed until I had traded for 29 vinyls. It cost me 33 vinyls. I think I did pretty good for my first time.
I got several things I wanted like: Pirates of the Caribbean dog,
Woody, Jessie, Ostrich, Pluto's Sweeter, Mickey Chocolate Bar, Glass Half Empty, Fozzie Bear, the rare and hard to find Aqua Mouse (traded 3 for that). Overall it was a great event and we meet a ton of people and people we had met on the forums. Today we are going to another event at the Glendale Galleria. All the extra stock we had is almost all gone!
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