Phase one of our Disney adventure is over, and it was a fantastic. As you may or may not know, the aim of this blog was to write about our adventures planning, and executing a trip to Disney World in Florida. Life got in the way, and we had to delay our trip by a couple of years. Then, life presented us an opportunity to get a taste of the Disney adventure before we headed to Florida. As it turns out, we were going to be near Paris France, and we had a couple of days to do something fun. We decided that we would test out the European Disney waters. This was not going to be replacing our Disney World adventure, instead it would serve as an appetizer.
We arrived extremely late to our hotel, the Sequoia Lodge. It was a bit of a walk in the cool French air to get to our hotel, but once we arrived we found our lodgings to be spectacular. First of all they set up our bed with all kinds of chocolate coins, and letters wishing us a happy anniversary (it was our 10th). We also discovered that we had a balcony, and it was huge. It was big enough for 3 rooms worth of balconies, but it was all ours. We put away everything we could, and instantly fell asleep knowing we had a busy day the next morning.
The weather on the first day of this Paris adventure was not going be in our favour. On this first day rain was in the forecast, and rain is what we got. It wasn't so rainy that it stopped us from visiting the parks, but it was a little bit grey. We had a plan for this first day however, since every day of this trip extra magic hours were taking place in the morning at Disneyland, we decided that even if we were going to the Disney Studios Park we'd spend the first few hours at Disneyland going on the hard to get on attractions.
After a bit of research, I learned that one of the longest, and slowest, line ups in the entire park was for Peter Pans Flight. Apparently it has something to do with ride capacity problems. So on our first day we figured it would be best to get this ride out of the way. Even coming near the beginning of extra magic hours, the line for this ride was pretty long, about 30 minutes, but it was well worth it, a great way to start this trip.
After our quick stop in Disneyland we headed straight over to Disney Studios and went for our first fast pass, Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy. This was the newest ride in all of Paris Disney, and is known to have legendary long lines (2 or 3 hours). We managed to pick up a fast pass for a later that afternoon, and it was well worth it. The rest of the studios was fairly quite, with only a few short lines here and there. Allison even manged to get on the Rockin' Rollercoaster with only a 10 or 20 minute wait. We managed to get into almost every attraction we wanted, and those that we didn't manage were shows that just didn't fit into our schedule later on.
The highlight of the day however was Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy, the newest gem in this park, and one of the only rides we took on twice (the second ride being on our last day). It was technically fantastic, and so detailed any Disney fan could only love it. One thing that really surprised me after this first day was how much people on the internet really dislike this park. Most people call it a half day park, and say that other than a few shows, and this new Ratatouille ride, it's not really worth it. Allison and I enjoyed ourselves a whole lot at the Studios Parks, and as you'll see in the 3rd installment of this blog series, it was the park we visited most.
Our first day was also when we came across a problem that many people have at both of these parks, bad food options. While our lunch was fine, our dinner was a huge disappointment. I'd read on the internet that Paris Disney had pretty lousy options for food, I was blown away at how lousy they were. It's not that there are no restaurants, it's just that so many of them have really bad food. Our first dinner was at the Steak House in the Disney Village, and it was pretty bad. We came when it was very slow, yet our food took forever, our sever left and didn't come back the whole night (we had to ask another server if we could pay him instead) and the steaks were pretty horrible.
Fortunately this didn't damper our day at all, particularly since we were expecting bad food. After riding the Tower of Terror one last time, we decided to call it a night. We were completely drained, from the lack of sleep the night before and the huge amount of walking all day, but happy. We went to bed ready for our day at Disneyland.
Stay tuned next week for part two of our Disney adventure.
No comments:
Post a Comment