Woke up early – well, okay, the noisy garbage collectors woke us up early. But it meant that we got up, showered, threw a few things in our small shoulder bags, and we were out of the apartment by 8:45…. So that we could go to Disneyland!!!
We took the RER from Luxembourg to Les Halles, and transferred to the red line to take us all the way out there. The ride was pretty uneventful – not a lot of people heading out of the city at that time. At 9:45 we arrived at Marne la Vallee station – up the escalators, and suddenly Disneyland! Sorta.
It was easy to spot the signs to the buses to the hotels – where, weirdly enough, Hotel Santa Fe is the closest bus. (Clearly Disney hasn’t worked out that they are supposed to put the “value” hotel buses farther away…) One arrived within a few minutes, and it was loaded to the gills. A far cry from the buses at WDW in Florida, there were children pressed against the windows and doors – kinda scary. Watching that bus empty out made me a bit nervous, but I was still excited at the time.
We rode to the hotel along windy roads, so it wasn’t super obvious how far the hotel was. That said, I had read that it was only a 15-20 minute walk (though Disney describes it as 20-25 minutes) – we just didn’t know which way to go. Our first glimpse of the hotel was pretty positive – a giant “drive in movie” screen picture of Clint Eastwood, a big reception area, and a separate area to get off the bus. We went in to reception, walked up to the desk, and within minutes the helpful castmember had given us our park tickets, breakfast reservations, and told us where we could stow our bags until our room was ready at 3. So within 20 minutes of arriving by train, we were ready to set off!
Again, not really knowing how to walk to the park, we decided to take the bus. This may have been a mistake. Now, in Florida, there are organized bus queuing areas, and everyone is relatively orderly. Of course, that’s because our culture doesn’t approve of line jumping. Here, it was chaos. Rather than queues, it was more of a pen – with openings that aligned with the various openings on the bus. It’s clear that at some point they had to alter the pens – by putting up pollards at the point where the “pen” meets the curb – to deter people from just pushing in at the back (if that makes sense).
Then the bus pulled up, it was chaos. Even before the bus had stopped, people were running at it, hoping, perhaps, that the doors would open before it arrived at the “pen”. Once it stopped, the doors opened, and everyone just pushed in, regardless of children, strollers, etc. Crazy. We got trapped behind an English family who just didn’t know what to do. In the end, we basically had to go around them and squeeze ourselves on.
Thankfully, it was a very short ride – but it made us realize that we really needed to figure out where the walkway was!
We got back to the train station and headed through the lackluster security for our first glimpse of Disneyland Parc. They’ve designed the entrance beautifully, placing the grand hotel right at the gates – fantastic! You go through the arches underneath the hotel and through the turnstiles and you emerge at the familiar view of the Main Street USA train station – but without the “floral Mickey” garden. But once underneath the train tracks, it’s again a very familiar vista – looking up Main Street toward the castle – which, here, is a pinkish red. (Gorgeous, but I still think Magic Kingdom in Florida has the best castle so far.)
You could see other design improvements, however. At DLR and WDW, when there are parades, it’s nearly impossible to move in or out of the park. Here they built arcades that run behind the shops so that you can quickly move through. Very smart!
We decided to head directly for one of our two favorite rides – “Phantom Manor” – and to try to get there by “guessing” rather than by looking at the map. So we headed into Frontierland, and soon saw Big Thunder Mountain – or Big Thunder Mesa, as it’s called here. Up on a hill to our left, in a fantastic old “wooden” house, was Phantom Manor. Gorgeous! We essentially ran in, and were let in to the first possible elevator. It was strange – the introductory voiceover is in French, which meant that most visitors couldn’t understand it, so most people completely ignored it. We entered the “stretching room” – which felt very small, but did have 4 totally different portraits. The castmembers are having a tiny bit of fun, but not enough, frankly. My very basic French meant that I could understand that it’s the same speech – “this chamber has no windows, and no doors!” There’s also no scream on the track, and it was so dimly lit that I couldn’t tell if there was a “body” on the rope in the cupola or not. Still, exciting. When the doors open, most people rush out, which meant we had plenty of time to enjoy the morphing “paintings” (which, as at WDW, are digital, rather than painted). One interesting difference: the cat lady turns into a black panther, not a tiger. Strange choice?
Then into the loading area – same lovely brass bats, and a much more attractive backdrop. Weird lack of voiceover here – no “doom buggies” or “I will lower the safety bar”, etc. In fact, there’s no voiceover at all, so it was difficult to sense the “story” throughout the house. There’s something about a bride, but not sure what happened to the groom. Other differences – the bride is holding the “floating” candlestick in the hallway, and the coffin in the conservatory has a cheap shadow piano player (nothing nearly as nice as the one in DLR). The ballroom, rather than being a birthday, is a wedding party – though it still looks as if a hearse has crashed in to the room. Not sure if anything is going on in the “picture” of the house – it’s not the two dueling gentlemen. Madame Leota speaks in English and French, but there’s no response when she asks the spirits to ring a bell, etc. The biggest difference is in the graveyard scene – rather than an old world graveyard, it’s a wild west graveyard and ghost town. The singing busts are still there, but that’s the only time you hear “Grim Grinning Ghosts” at all – sad. And there’s a “mayor” who doffs his hat (and head), while speaking lines from the American voiceover, but that’s all. And then at the end, rather than hitchhiking ghosts, you get little demons hanging on to the top of your doom buggy. And at the very end, you see the bride talking – perhaps saying things like Constance says at DLR, but not sure.
Wil liked the wild west graveyard, but I thought it was a little cheesy. We both missed having the song playing as a finale, and both really missed the voiceover. Just what, exactly, happened to the bride? And we never saw the groom?!? Or was he the cackling skeleton? Who knows.
We rode it again immediately… and over the course of our stay rode it a few more times. It’s fun, but not as good as either DLR or WDW. We did, however, like the inclusion of a “Boot Hill” cemetery after the exit – nice touch.
Leaving Phantom Manor we walked along the “Rivers of America” frontage towards the (sadly closed for maintenance) Indiana Jones ride – which apparently is very different from our Indiana Jones ride. With great restraint (meaning we didn’t run), we then saw the big pirate ship and the banner for Pirates of the Caribbean – my favorite ride.
Their Pirates has a long interior queue area – much like Florida, where you wind around a castle for what seems like forever. The loading is pretty much the same, but after that there are a lot of differences.
We had heard that Paris’s Pirates is a “true” ride – meaning that it hasn’t been “Jack Sparrowed”. Well, sorta. It’s a much different ride – as if the ride had been shuffled – and starts with a very brief float past a restaurant and then a lift up to the top of the castle – where you glimpse the battle below.
Here’s the thing – sometimes things in rides break. In our time at DLP, we noticed several differences within individual rides. On “It’s a Small World” on Tuesday, one of the “carousels” in the finale room was stopped. But on Wednesday it worked. And things changes in Phantom Manor. So the fact that the cute teenage “wench” next to the “pooped pirate” wasn’t there when we went through on either day could mean that she has also been edited out of the story… or it could mean that she just wasn’t working. I’m going to assume the latter – since there was a weirdly graphic “shadow” in a nearby window that showed two men pulling a woman this way and that – including holding her legs. Weird.
So we liked a lot of the parts of Paris’s Pirates, though I still prefer the original. There wasn’t very much “Pirates Life for Me” action, and some of the tableaus were missing or limited at the end. But we still rode it several times over the course of our visit!
After leaving Pirates, we wandered through Fantasyland (yep, the queues for Peter Pan’s Flight are crazy here, too), admired the castle, and did the “dragon” walk-through. (Fantastic!) Then we headed over to Discoveryland, which is perfect in its Jules Vernian theming. Giant airship hangar? Check. Nautilus in water? Check. Great big gorgeous mountain, with a giant cannon on the side? CHECK! Of course, it was closed…. But they hoped to have it open later in the day. We did walk through the Nautilus, which was very pretty, but I would rather have slowly moved through a lake.
We wandered around a bit more, going on rides occasionally, looking in the shops, and doing a lot of people watching. We went on Star Tours – in French – which was still fun but needed some serious work on the soundtrack. (Unless French people assume that all robots have warbly voices?) Fun to hear C3-P0 speak French – but, of course, he speaks millions of languages… Experienced some pretty hardcore line dodging – lots of people just trying to push through the line. Very, very weird.
Eventually, we noticed that Space Mountain Mission 2 had opened… so we hurried in. After only a 10-minute wait (in an attractive queue area), we were on board. And… I hated every second of the ride! I guess I thought it would be pretty and swirly – like a prettier version of the ride at Disneyland. Nope. Completely different ride – loops, barrel rolls, lots of smacking my head on the restraints. Never again. (But it was gorgeous to be “shot out of a cannon” to start our trip.)
It felt weird to have the park closing at 7 – I mean, what else are people going to do? We did wander around Disney Village for a while – just some Disney shops, a few restaurants, and a big cinema that happened to be showing Sex and the City 2. I have a hard time imagining the cinema in Downtown Disney putting up a giant billboard advertising that movie.
We went back to our room after having a look at the buffet – the only dining choice at our hotel. (Why we didn’t have a look around, I don’t know. But we didn’t.) The lines were crazy, so we decided to get a bottle of wine from the gift shop (where we met the first truly good castmember of our visit) and head back to the room to rest. When we returned to the buffet, we ended up behind a group of 5 French girls at the cashier.
Here’s something we noticed right off in France. Cashiers are always asking for correct change, or at least closer change. My favorite is when Wil was paying for something that cost 7 Euros, and paid with 10… and was asked if he had 7 instead. Really? Anyway, the restaurant sold one thing, essentially: a buffet. You could choose to add a drink to your bill for 2 euro more. So why it took 3 or 4 minutes per person in the queue I cannot imagine. Because we had more than 15 minutes to prepare, Wil and I made exact change, which we handed to the cashier. The cashier looked at us as if we were insane, and inspected each coin as if he had never seen such wonders in his life. I should point out that this man was French, and most likely used euro in his real life. He also WORKED AS A CASHIER.
Once in to the buffet, it was just as chaotic as we expected. Though there weren’t a lot of people (it was after 9 by this point), it was still strangely crowded. And whereas most menus in the park were clearly labeled as far as vegetarian choices go, the buffet was not. Still, some of the salads were good, and we liked the cheesy potatoes and the fresh guacamole.
Back to the room – quiet! – and then to bed.
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