Twice Mice

For our very first trip to Disneyland Paris, Adrian and I invited two of our young Canadian-American-Belgian friends to join us. Ms 8 and Ms 14 were almost as excited to meet The Mouse as I was. Disneyland Paris is Europe’s most popular tourist destination, with 15.4 million visitors to the park last year, an average of 42,000 visitors per day. We were going on the first weekend of the February school holidays, and it was going to be packed. Detailed and precise planning was required. I hit up the various forums and review sites for tips and tricks to maximise our experience and minimize the hassle, and constructed an eight page plan for our 48 hours of magic.

I discovered that guests of the official hotels have access to Extra Magic Hours – entry to some of the rides two hours before the park officially opens. So we caught the train on Friday night, and we all went to bed early, ready to rise at 6:30 in the morning. Ms 14 is not a morning person, but I told her that if she woke up, she could have a present. I had bought us all crocheted mouse hats from Etsy, to keep us warm and get us in the spirit of the weekend.

At eight o’clock, we were the first guests to walk under the banner “Parc Disneyland” ( “they spelled it wrong”, remarked Ms 8). It was dark and freezing, but we had all of Main Street and its 225,000 lights to ourselves. We walked straight to Space Mountain: Mission 2, and rode the first shuttle of the day. It is an extraordinary ride, zooming past planets and asteroids, soaring through a sea of stars. Adrian laughed at me because I said that I wished that it would go a lot more slowly, so that I could enjoy the setting in a more relaxing atmosphere. As it was, I screamed and screamed through the 360 degree loops and turns. Adrian and Ms 14 repeated Space Mountain a couple more times while Ms 8 and I went off to experience some more gentle rides, like zapping aliens with Buzz Lightyear.

When Adrian couldn’t find me, he called me on my phone. I told him that I was in a spaceship, but he said that didn’t really narrow it down considering we were currently in Discoveryland. I spotted him down below me, and told him that I was up in the Orbitron, going around and around in the sky above. He spotted me and waved, and then chastised me for using a mobile phone while operating a spaceship.

Then it was onto Fantasyland, the fairy-tale village. We soared above the lights of London with Peter Pan, flew through the air with Dumbo, commanded a harras of Lancelot’s mighty steeds, and Adrian failed in his attempt to twirl one of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups.

At ten o’clock the park officially opened, and we smugly watched the stampede of hundreds of people running towards Space Mountain. We were content to sail through the many lands of It’s a Small World (originally designed for the 1964 New York World’s Fair), and then we found ourselves terribly lost in Alice’s Curious Labyrinth.

By this time it was snowing, and we were cold and exhausted. The lines were now at least 60 minutes for all the rides, so we returned to the hotel. Even though it was called the Chuck Wagon café, the hotel restaurant buffet was actually excellent. The girls could eat the American style food that they loved, while there was plenty of vegetarian choices for Adrian. After that, we enjoyed long baths and naps to warm up and rest our busy bones.

Feeling rejuvenated, we returned to the park. Adrian and I reserved front row seats for the pending parade, while the girls went exploring. Ms 14 returned with popcorn, and Ms 8 returned with Thumper, the rabbit from Bambi. Thumper accompanied us for the rest of the weekend, riding roller-coasters, getting covered in hot chocolate, and being greeted with “Bonjour Panpan” by all the cast members. Interestingly, many of the Disney characters have different names in French. Goofy is Dingo, Chip & Dale are Tic & Tac, Scrooge McDuck is Balthazar Picsou, Huey, Dewey & Loui are Riri, Fifi & Loulou, and my favourite: Captain Hook is Capitaine Crochet.

The parade was announced in half a dozen languages, and we guessed that the announcer had learned her English in Australia from the way she pronounced “Deeh-sney’s Wuhn-nce Uh-pon ah Dreeeam Puh-Raayde”. We figured that occurrence was a lot more likely than an Australian person learning to speak another five languages fluently. The parade was magical, with a bunch of floats and dozens of dancers recreating many famous and beloved characters.

At the centre of the Park stands Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Castle), the most beautiful of all the Disney castles. In America, any castle is seen as magical, but in Europe the standards are much higher – Neuschwanstein castle (the inspiration for the original Disney Castle) is only seven hours away. Copying an existing structure would not suffice, so the Imagineers delved into old fairytales and medieval illuminated manuscripts for inspiration. The result was a whimsical rendering of turrets and towers. As we admired it, I explained to a disinterested Ms 8 that it looked much higher than it actually was due to the use of forced perspective. “Way to ruin the magic” commented Adrian, even though we both understand that unweaving the rainbow only serves to enhance its beauty.

The inside of the castle is like a miniature cathedral, and is lit by intricate stain glass windows created by Peter Chapman, who came out of retirement after having previously restored the windows of Notre Dame de Paris. The nine complementing tapestries were weaved in Aubusson, France, with an extra copy of one created as a gift to Head Imagineer Tony Baxter. The tallest window of the tallest tower is constantly lit, to remind guests that at Disneyland, the princess is always present.

After that, it was time to explore Adventureland. The landscapers did an amazing job of finding lush green tropical plants that thrived even in the harsh winter of Paris. We caught a rickety loop-the-loop train through Indiana Jones’ Temple of Peril, and then journeyed back to the Wild West in Fronteirland. We first visited the Phantom Manor, and poor Ms 8 was so terrified that she hid in my arms the whole time, despite my reassurances that everything was “fake fake fake”. However, after realizing that it was not actually scary at all, we repeated the ride so that she could appreciate the effects. We loved seeing the ‘ghosts’ dancing in the dining room and the skeleton head hovering over our carriage.

Then we were off to ride through the old mines of Big Thunder Mountain. This is my favourite rollercoaster in Disneyland – you zoom through a tunnel to arrive on an island in the Rivers of the Far West, with robotic donkeys watching us as we zoomed up and down, without any of those awful 360 degree loops that turn my stomach. We grabbed a few copies of the photo of us all on the train with our mouse hats. As in nearly all the action shots from the weekend, Ms 14 looked stoic and unmoved by the g-forces she was experiencing.

With our stomachs rumbling, we ventured into the Arabian Peninsula to Agrabah, Aladdin’s home town. We were greeted with a buffet of Middle-Eastern delights, and we relaxed in the warmth before heading out into the cold dark night. By now, most people had left the parks, and the lines were once again non-existent. After a few more turns on Indiana Jones’ Temple of Peril, we hiked up to the Caribbean to visit the Pirates. This was another favourite of mine, drifting underground in the warm humid air, surrounded by 119 singing and dancing robotic pirates.

At the end of the day we returned to Discoveryland to pilot a few more spaceships, and then it was time to head back to the hotel to get some sleep and get ready for another big day tomorrow, this time at Walt Disney’s Studio Park.

Related posts:

1. Paris, Tallinn, & Helsinki
2. Two Years
3. A weekend of parks

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under France.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.