Euro Day 14 - Disney Paris

You know when the day starts with a 5:00 AM wakeup call that I am likely in charge of the itinerary. The fact that we were heading to Disney that day made getting everybody pointed in the right direction a bit easier.  We had a 7:00am train from Brussels direct to Disney but needed to get from our place in Ghent to the train station and then a 30 minute ride to Brussels.  Everything went off without a hitch and we arrived at the park (located an hour outside of Paris) about an hour before opening.

There are two parks at Disneyland Paris and Jake led us in planning to make sure we could hit all the attractions on the top of our list.  Overall I wish Disney would retain unique elements for each park - rather than trying to replicate successful attractions at one park to all the others.  One unique attraction here is the Ratatouille ride.  So we hit that first knowing it is one of the more popular rides. Leveraging good planning and fast passes, we were able to accomplish all of what was on the top of our lists by 8pm.  So now we had to decide if we were going to stay for the Illuminations finale at 11pm.  As we were transitioning from one park to another I observed a heavy flow of people exiting the park and was perplexed a the cause (bomb scare ?  killer bees ?).  Kelsey noted "Dad I think most people probably think spending 10 hours at Disney is enough for one day".  Fair enough but we did stick it out to see the majority of the illuminations show before hustling off to take a train into Paris.

We like our Disney and have been to both Disneyland and DisneyWorld a few times. I know it is not for everybody but we enjoy the atmosphere and overall experience. Disneyland Paris is very similar to DisneyLand in California and lacks the scale and elegance of the Florida property.  The only way you would know you were in France is due to people openly ignore the smoking rule and lighting up like it is 1961.  Some of the workers also must have slept through the Disney customer service training as they looked like they were in a labor camp.  Reminds me of the foreign workers that they import to our local Six Flags every summer ("I have made a terrible mistake ! This is not anything like the brochure !")

This trip has been in the planning for awhile and I likely booked our Paris hotel 8-10 months ago.  One of the reasons that I chose this particular hotel was it was on a direct line from Disney.  However  I never got the memo that starting on Aug 1st - there was maintenance on that line making the end of the line 4 stops short of where our hotel was located. I really wish I had the temerity to take a photo of my lovely bride's face when this fact become apparent at 11:30pm when we had been going almost non-stop since 5AM.  Turned out to only cause a 20 minute delay in our journey as we had to change to a different line.  Everybody's tank was on E (or below) when we finally got to our hotel at 1 AM.