Day 23: Disneyland Paris

If I could tell a story in pictures this would be the moment for that. 

Disneyland was the perfect day. It was magical and it felt familiar. Molly and I had to keep reminding ourselves that we were in France.

We had nearly the perfect day. The sun was shining, the sky was almost perfectly clear. We got there on our own perfectly fine. We used the remaining Metro tickets we were given by our tour guide to get to the station where we switched to the RER train. We rode that train for about thirty minutes out to Disney, which has their own stop on the line.

When we got off the train you needed to put your tickets into the machine to be able to get out of the station. Well, our tickets were not working. We weren't able to get out. At that point we were approached by a guy who spoke little English but told us that we needed to get our tickets changed out at the machine. He showed us tickets that he had that said that name of the station on them, ours did not say that. When we went over to the machine, it was broken. So, he brought us over to the gate and let us through with the tickets that he had. He then brought us over to the machines on the other side and showed us the ticket that we would need to buy and how it needed to be a zone 5 ticket. Ok, we told him, we will buy it later. 

Well, it was then that he wanted money from us. He wouldn't leave us alone and we didn't really understand because he didn't really speak english. But it was clear he wanted money from us. Forty four euros, to be exact, the price of two tickets. We ended up giving him forty, which was less then the tickets actually were. 

We don't really know what happened, if we were actually scammed. We would have needed to get our tickets changed to get out of the station, we didn't have the right ones. I don't know if the machine was actually not working, but it looked like it wasn't. I don't know if we really needed to 22 euro day tickets but that was the only option I saw on the machine. And we gave him less then the tickets were, so he wasn't making a profit. He let us keep the tickets we went through with, and lead us to believe that they would get us back. We didn't actually try it because one of the gates was open, so when we were leaving we didn't have to use a ticket. I guess we will never know. 

It was pretty scary though, we couldn't understand him and he wouldn't leave us alone. 

It was all better though when he was gone and we turned to corner and there was a giant sign that said Disneyland Paris. 

There was a huge, beautiful building that was the first thing you saw. I don't know what it was, or what it was used for. Although on the way out it looked like it may have been a hotel. We found guest relations and I stood in line for that while Molly stood in line for the bag check. We finished at the same time, me with free tickets in hand, and her rid of our giant back packs. 

I took an obsessive amount of photos. About 700 hundred of them, as well as a few fantastic videos. 

Main Street U.S.A looked exactly like the one in Florida except there was no train station at the end of it. The emporium looked the same and the opposite end of the street was still sandwiched between Casey's Corner and the Ice Cream Parlor. 

The hub looked the same as well except there was no Walt statue in the middle and the entrances to all of the lands were different. Oh, and the castle. The castle was beautiful. It was pink and huge and had winding staircases and stained glass windows. It looked perfect. 

I am also pretty sure I had a little play set of it when I was a kid. I bet I still have it some where. 

The first place we went was into Discoveryland, which is their Tomorrowland, to get fast passes to Space Mountain: Mission 2. Discoveryland was smaller then Tomorrowland, but they still had a Buzz Lightyear ride, an Autopia, and even a Cool Zone. Star Tours was also in Discoveryland, and there was a cafeteria that also housed a giant theatre. 

With fast passes in hand we went back into the Hub and into the cavern under the castle where the dragon was. It was a massive animatronic dragon that would sleep and then wake up and screech at us. It was very impressive. 

We then went into Adventureland where there is an Indiana Jones Roller Coaster as well as Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House. We really only cut through Adventureland and went down into Frontierland to check out Thunder Mountain. 

We spent the a lot of the morning just walking around and exploring. We wanted to go get Fast Passes for the Indiana Jones Coaster, but is was closed. We then decided to get them for Thunder Mountain instead but when we were standing in line to get the passes, it closed as well. Our luck was not good in the morning. So we went back into Discoveryland because my Space Mountain Fast Pass time had come. We got fast passes for Buzz Lightyear and then I went on the coaster. 

Molly doesn't do loops so I road it alone. Yeah, weird, Space Mountain having loops. But it did. It was more like Rockin Roller Coaster. You start at the bottom of a tube, are shot up the tube to the top of the ride. It is then all indoors like normal except is decorated with neon meteors and other space items so you aren't in complete darkness. It was a good coaster, I really liked it. Interestingly, we didn't dump out into a gift shop. 

From there we went into Fantasyland, which was the biggest section of the park. They have It's a Small World, a Snow White ride, a Pinocchio ride, a carousel, and a Alice and Wonderland themed hedge maze. We walked around and explored, checked out the restaurant where you can meet the princesses, but it was full for the day, and we went into the a shop. 

We then went back into Discoveryland again to ride Buzz Lightyear. 

The ride was incredibly similar to the one in Florida except there was a lot more moving parts. Things would pop up and then go away and the Z targets would light up when you hit them. I did not do very well, I was not a Heros Galactique. This ride did dump into a gift shop, one that was a lot like the Arcade in Tomorrowland. That was a fun store, I bought a bunch of pins.  

At this point we were starving. Molly really wanted to eat at Casey's Corner because no one is ever willing to eat there when she does in Florida. So we got hot dogs and fries for lunch. Right when we were finishing the 20th Anniversery train  came through. It was a giant, colorful train full of character, mostly the fab five. It was like Move It, Shake It, Celebrate It at the Magic Kingdom except when it stopped in the hub the characters all got out and you could meet them. 

Tangent about characters: You know how at the parks in Florida meeting characters is very organized? You wait in a line, when you get to the front of the line you have about a minute, less if you aren't getting an autograph, and then you take the picture and are moved a long. It's very fast and regulated. Not in Paris. Except for meeting the Princesses, Mickey, and the Pooh characters, it was everyone for themselves. The characters are responsible for figuring out who is next. The character attendant doesn't really do anything, we didn't even see one with Jack Sparrow. They all seem to have a system though, people crowd around them in a circle and they move from one side of to the other taking one person at a time. And they seem to spend as much time with each person as they want. 

We stumbled onto Peter Pan after lunch, we didn't even see him standing there as we were taking pictures of a giant rock shaped like a skull. There wasn't very many people standing there so we decided to take a picture with him. We stood in the circle and he eventually got to us. He was really impressive. He was speaking French, English, and Spanish and could switch between them smoothly. He talked to me for so long, at least four minutes. He asked where I was from and when I told him Florida he made a face and then asked if I was an orange. I said yes. He then asked Molly if she was an orange, she said no, she was a nectarine. "There's always one," He said. He asked if this was my first time there. I said yes, here. He agreed I must have been to the one in Florida a lot, I told him I worked there and he got really excited. He asked if I knew his friend Tinkerbell and I said not very well. Then he asked if I knew Captain Hook, but he's not really a friend. I told him I worked in Tomorrowland and he said he doesn't really go there, its not as cool. 

Do you see how long this is going on! It never ended! You could feel the tension from the rest of the people waiting. It probably didn't help that we were speaking English. At one point he called out a guy for not smiling. 

We finally took a photo and then Molly went. And he talked to her for four minutes too! She tried to get him to do her signature Molly pose and he was hilarious trying to do it. He wasn't having it, and said he felt like Aladdin. He didn't want us to leave and the people around us clearly hated us. But he kept switching from English to French to talk to them all. It was all very impressive, and fun. One of the best character experiences I have ever had. 

After Peter we had time to kill before our Thunder Mountain fast pass time so we met Mickey Mouse. It was a forty minute wait and while I don't think that it actually lasted that long they were playing Mickey Mouse shorts while you waited so it went by really fast. Mickey is still my favorite. Meeting him was perfect. 

We then met Jack Sparrow who was also very impressive. I guess speaking multiple languages must be a requirement to be a character because they all did it perfectly. He sounded more like Jack Sparrow in French though, which was strange. He took my glasses and tried to figure out how to wear them, they ended up on his head. He stole Molly's necklace and put it in her sleeve. He was fun. 

We went back into Frontierland at that point to ride Thunder Mountain but it was closed again. We saw why quickly, one of the trains was stuck on the lift hill. We watched the people evacuate while we waited in line for Phantom Manor, the equivalent of the Haunted Mansion. It was very similar, the beginning in the stretching room was the same except that it was in French and the pictures were different. It was still a continuously moving ride and a few of the same scenes were there like the ball room and Madame Lesota. The weird part was that it wasn't a graveyard at the end. Well, it was more of a skeleton graveyard. We felt like we were all of a sudden in Pirates. That was strange. And there were the mirrors for the hitchhiking ghosts but there weren't actually any ghosts. :( 

At this point it was about 4:30 so we headed to the parade route to get seats for the 5 o'clock parade. The route was exactly the opposite of the one in the Magic Kingdom. It started over in Fantasyland, came down the opposite side of the castle, went the other way around the Hub, and went off Main Street on the opposite side. We went a little more towards Fantasyland and found perfect seats right along the rope. 

The parade was awesome, I got the whole thing on video. Interestingly, the music was all in English. It wasn't even a French/English mix. It was also interesting to see what their priorities were. In the Magic Kingdom the princesses are everything. Here they didn't even have a float, they all walked together in a group with their princesses. And Belle wasn't even there. What. She's the one from France! Jungle book had a float though, as did Alice in Wonderland. It was a 10 minute parade, an awesome parade. The same Peter Pan we met was in the Parade but he didn't see us. :( 

We had much better luck after the parade. We hit It's a Small World, which was basically the same except there was a giant America section. We then finally got on Thunder Mountain. That was fun, and a little terrifying. The breaks and lift hill on the one in the Magic Kingdom are loud, but these were concerningly loud. The ride itself is on an island so there are two parts where you are in complete darkness because you have to go under the lake. Those were the parts I liked the best. They also took your picture on this one, which did not turn out good at all. 

We then got on Pirates almost immediately. It was quite a bit more elaborate, at least the beginning was. The end was basically the same. They took your picture on this one too. Which we were not expecting. It was during a part that was pitch black and you went down a tiny hill. We look very unenthused in the photo. It is actually pretty funny. 

After Pirates we were starving. We had actually been starving before Pirates but nothing was open. It was 7:30 and the park closed at 10! Why was nothing open! We asked a cast member and she actually said, "Well, we close at 10 tonight so not much is going to be open." What. That is over 2 hours away. Why. 

We eventually found food in Discoveryland. We got our food and then sat and watched Pixar shorts at the giant stage. It was so nice to sit and relax, we were both hurting. Molly was getting sick, she has been for days. She was having such an intense sinus issue that her teeth were hurting. I was hurting from falling off the bike and because the shoes I was wearing had no support. That's some Disney dedication for you, we were there until the end even though we were struggling. 

The only thing we had left to do was watch the night show. It was the same concept as Celebrate the Magic, they projected things on the castle. Except they added water effects and more fireworks to this one. The show was amazing. I am stunned every time I watch one of these shows, what they can do to the castle is unbelievable, and completely indescribable. I took a video of it too. 

It blew us away. 

We basically booked it out of there with the rest of the crowd when it was over. We caught the first train back into Paris. We listened to Disney music so it went by very quickly. When we got into Paris we just had to take a Metro to the station where we could catch the train, and we were already pros at the Metro so that was a piece of cake. 

From there it got a little more complicated. My mom and dad had helped us out with the planning since we have zero access to internet on the ship and so we knew the last train to Le Havre left at 11:50. We got to the station around 10:50 so we had plenty of time, we weren't worried about that. What we were worried about was that we didn't see that train on the board. We saw a train arriving from Le Havre at 11:47 but the one departing train we saw said it left at 6:30 the next morning. Not good.

When we were standing at one of the ticket machines trying to see if that would help us we ran into some other SAS girls. Yay! We weren't alone. Together we found the right end of the track with a board that listed our train and then successfully found an information desk where we learned that the ticket office was closed but that we can ask the manager of the train before we can get on if we can buy tickets. 

So we waited until 11:25 and when the train rolled up and the track number was listed we booked it to the first car and found the manager. He told us to just get on and we were able to buy tickets at face value. It worked out well.

I passed out on the train ride so it went by really quickly. I felt like I was in Harry Potter because the train was divided into compartments. We shared one with a few other SAS girls, one who had been traveling completely alone. Props to her. 

We arrived in Le Havre at 2:10 and found complete deadness. There was absolutely nothing there. Well, that’s a lie. There were no people there, but there was a completely empty taxi stand. There were three locals standing in line before us 15 SAS kids. There had been even more of us on the train that we joined up with when we were standing at the taxi stand. Three of them decided to walk and headed off in one direction. We decided that just standing at the taxi stand was not doing us any good because nothing was happening so we walked into the hotel right across the street and asked them to call us a taxi. 

He said they were sending five. The only problem was that they were going to the taxi stand and there were three people already there. I don't think they actually ever sent us those five taxis because only one would show up at a time, and very slowly. I am pretty sure it was the same two guys that just kept coming back. But we eventually got in one and we didn’t even have to tell him where to go, he already knew: ship. 

I got into bed at 3:00. It was magical. 

I slept till noon and full two days later I am still sore but it was worth it! 

I've been to Disneyland Paris!