2 nannies on a mission to find Mary Poppins in Disneyland Paris-updated 11/26

[Rienchen]

Over the past few months I've been slightly addicted to reading trip/dining reports, so I thought I'd write my own

who: my friend J and I, we've known eachother for about 1.5 years and both work as nannies in London. It was her first ever trip to Disneyland Paris
when:Fri 18th-Sun 20th of November 2011
where:Santa Fe Hotel
why: do we need a reason? ;-)
********************
Friday 18.11.2011
My alarm went off at 4:15am!!!
My friend J and I met at 5:45am to to take the train to London St. Pancras to catch the Eurostar, we loved how quiet public transport was at this time of day.
We arrived at St. Pancras International with plenty of time to spare and decided to pick up our tickets and head through to the boarding area. Our 7:34am train to Lille was slightly delayed, but we're not worried as we had 35 minutes to change trains. Changing trains in Lille was very easy, just across the platform. The TGV to Marne de la Vallee felt much nicer than the Eurostar and because it was fairly early in the morning it was very quiet.
The journey seemed to fly by and by 12pm we're on the shuttle bus to our Hotel, Santa Fe.

Check-in was fairly smooth, despite a small language barrier and we were happy to find out that our room was ready and we were able to drop our bags and freshen up before heading to the park.

The view from our room:

random 'vulcano' in the parking lot:

We picked to go to Disney Studios today as we only had half a day left and didn't want to do Parc Disneyland while being exhausted, we wanted to make the most of that park the next day and make sure my friend was able to take in all of the magic of seeing the castle for the very first time.

Within 2 minutes of entering the Disney Studios we met none other than MICKEY MOUSE! There was no orderly queue and people kept pushing to the front. Luckily the 'handler' noticed that I was patiently waiting my turn and called me forward at one point so my friend could take my picture.

We didn't really have a plan for today, just thought we'd do whatever...and next thing we knew we were front row for the Stars'n'Cars Parade

After this we started to feel hungry, I had looked at the menus online and picked 'backlot cafe' for lunch as the sandwiches seemed quite nice and a bit different from the burgers. However, it was closed
So we just ended up eating at 'En Coulisse' back in the 'Studio 1' building right by the entrance. We each had a 'menu 1', a chicken burger, chips and a drink. Nothing to write home about really. A bit cold and we forgot to grab salt for the chips, but it filled our stomachs.

At this point we grabbed a timetable and decided to go and see 'Animagique', which we absolutely loved. It was a very cute 20 min show mainly featuring Donalds adventures in the 'Disney vault', it was half French, half duck-English.

Afterwards we headed over to 'Cinemagique', which we found enjoyable but won't be repeating it anytime soon, we also didn't like getting wet during the show.

Like I said, we didn't have a plan so just started walking around, watched a few characters giving autographs and then walked past the 'Studio Tram Tour' and decided to ride it because it was a 'walk on'. Our tram seemed to have run out of petrol and we were a bit delayed. I had been on this at the Hollywood Studios in Orlando and it was an ok ride, nothing spectacular but it was nice sitting down and we're glad we did the ride that day and not on Sunday when we came back to the Studios because the wait then was 60 minutes!

We walked around some more until we ended up in the Toy Story playland, I remembered reading that it usually got very busy so we were pleased to see that the parachute drop and slinky Dog had short waits, infact 'Slinky Dog' was a walk on.
Parachute drop was a 15 minute wait and we loved this ride and giggled like children throughout the whole thing.
Slinky Dog was fun too but we definitely preferred Parachute drop, no way would we have gone on RC racer, that just looked like it was going to bring my lunch back up!

The park was due to close at 6pm and having been up since 4am we were all done by that point and headed back to the train station, ready for our next adventure-the Val D'Europe shopping center!
Our plan was to wander around the mall for a bit, get dinner and then buy some French goodies in the supermarket. However, we managed to mis-read the map and didn't realise that most of the restaurants were on one end of the mall when we had walked back to the entrance again. We didn't fancy walking over there again so just picked up some sandwiches and salad from the massive Auchan supermarket as well as some snacks and drinks for the next couple of days. Can't beat a €0.26 bottle of water compared to the €2.60 in the park.

We took the train back to the Hotel and went to bed around 10:30.
But first we had to join a very long queue at the check in desk because we had forgotten to ask for a hairdryer earlier when we arrived. We had to pay a refundable €20 deposit and were given a good powerful hairdryer.

All in all a wonderful first day at Disneyland Paris, I was so glad to be back for the first time in almost 10 years.

Next, would we manage to get up at 6am for 8am Extra Magic Hours at Parc Disney?

 

[PrincessCharlie]

I'm in! Was it difficult to get to Val D'Europe shopping center?

 

[Rienchen]

I'm in! Was it difficult to get to Val D'Europe shopping center?

A little confusing(mostly because we were tired) but not difficult at all. Once you're in the train station just follow the signs for 'trains to Paris', the people at the ticket counter speak English and one single ticket is €1.70.
It's only one stop from Disney and the shopping center is right at the exit, it's lovely and quite big. The main reason we went was to get snacks and French sweets/biscuits to take home ;-) but there's loads of shops to buy clothes as well if you were looking for those.

 

[DLPdaft]

oh my goodness - 6am start at DLP - thats dedication for you !

 

[karenmoloney]

I had a smile when reading your description of the language in Anamagique (duck English). Glad you had a great first day & looking forward too reading more.

 

[Linda67]

Great start, looking forward to reading along

 

[tinks_1989]

loved the first day looking forward to the next update x

 

[Rienchen]

I had a smile when reading your description of the language in Anamagique (duck English). Glad you had a great first day & looking forward too reading more.

Most shows were mainly in French and luckily we both understand basic French so it was fine, think it must be confusing to the children.
Especially because some characters have different names in French.

oh my goodness - 6am start at DLP - thats dedication for you !

We wanted to be there for 8am 'EMH' to take advantage of 2 hours in a slightly quieter park.
We loved how empty it was during that time and don't regret getting up at 6am(5 UK time)

Great start, looking forward to reading along

Thanks
Your solo TR was one of the first TR I read on here.

loved the first day looking forward to the next update x

Thanks for reading, are you excited about your next trip? We saw a few characters interact with tiny babies and it melted our hearts. Are you taking Elise back to DLP or WDW?

 

[Rienchen]

Today our alarm went off at 6am and we both managed to get up, shower and get ready in 1 hour. We arrived at breakfast just after 7am and were suprised to see quite a large amount of people already awake. There were a couple hundred of people wearing red clothing and we thought maybe we hadn't heard about the Saturday dress code ;-)
Turned out they were all part of one of the choirs performing at Parc Disney throughout the day.

Breakfast was fine, lots of carbohydrates...cereal, toast, rolls, croissants, chocolate croissants..some tinned fruit, stewed apple, natural yoghurt and sliced ham and cheese cubes. Also a choice of honey, jams and of course nutella
We loved the chocolate croissants and each made one roll with butter as a snack for later. We had in on our tray anyway, please don't tell me off for doing so, I was too full to eat it at breakfast and it would have been a waste.

Took the shuttle bus to the park and walked through the ticket turnstile around 8:05am *yay*

I told my friend to prepare for the first glimpse of the castle and I have to say we were both blown away. The one in Paris is so much prettier than I remembered.

We took some pictures of an almost empty Main Street USA and had a look which rides were open during the 'extra magic hours', I have to say that I was disappointed how few rides were running during that time...only Space Mountain, Buzz, Peter Pan, Dumbo and the Caroussel-that wasn't going to keep us busy for two hours.

We took our time walking through the castle and took everything in. It's breathtaking and magical and the christmas decorations were bautiful.

We rode Dumbo and were the only two people on it, then Peter Pan next, followed by one more round on Dumbo and then the Caroussel.

Then we headed over to Discoveryland, where we rode Buzz-our scores were low but I still won with 21000 compared to the 4700 my friend had, she told me it was because she was being careful to only shoot at the targets and I just just kept shooting. I beg to differ of course as I believe I'm just that skilled *hehe*

After this we were debating riding Space Mountain, I used to go on this when I first went to Disneyland but this time I just wasn't sure about it and my friend didn't like the idea of it being in the dark, so we decided against it.
On one of my trips in 1999(I think) I rode it several times in a row until I was happy with the ride picture ;-)

It was about 9:30 at this point and we had done all the ride we were interested in that were open at this time so we went back to Main Street USA for a bit of shopping. The park didn't open until 10am but there were 1000s of people coming in, so I guess the turnstiles must have been open already.

At 9:55 we joined the queue outside the entrance to Frontierland as it was closed during 'extra magic hours', at this point I told my friend that we had been incredibly lucky with the low crowd lewel on Friday and that this was more like what I had expected for a weekend a month before Christmas.
The rope dropped at 10 and half the people were making a run for Phantom Manor/Haunted Mansion and the other half was off to Big Thunder Mountain, which is where we were headed. We were considering getting a Fast Pass for later first but then just joined the queue to ride immediately, it only took 15 mins to get on the ride and we never really stopped in the queue.
We loved it, it felt so much faster than the one in Florida and I thought it lasted longer too. Didn't get a Fast Pass as the queue at the machines was quite long.

Next we walked over to the Haunted Mansion, despite everything being in French we understood the story line perfectly.

We walked past the 'Adventureland Rhythms of the Jungle' character meet and joined the queue to meet Baloo and King Louie. In front of us was a family with a young baby(6 months?) and when it was their turn we witnessed the sweetest character interaction. Baloo wanted to hold the little girl and sat down on the floor patting his lap to tell the parents to sit the little girl on his lap, she was sp happy to be cuddled by Baloo and tickled by King Louie and the parents got the sweetest pictures. It was just heartwarming to watch and nobody minded that they spent a little while longer than usual with this family as we all got to witness a little bit of Disney Magic

The park was getting really busy by now and the wait for 'It's a small World' was 70 minutes and for Pirates was 45 minutes. We were getting a bit hungry and decided to get lunch first before riding either one of them. On our way down Main Street we walked past the 'Winnie the Pooh' meet, so we joined the queue and both had our pictures taken with him. It was a bit strange but he was a bit of a camera hog and all of our pictures look like we snuck in the background ;-)

We got lunch at the Market Deli and each had a lovely sandwich with roasted tomatoes and chicken, it was really tasty and the bread tasted very fresh.

Halfway through lunch the 'Disney Dance Express' came down Main Street so we jumped up and had a quick look. It was just 2 or 3 'floats' so it didn't last very long and we were able to finish eating.

Afterwards we decided that we were happy to join the queue for 'It's a small world', the board said 60 minutes but luckily it only took 30. This is one of my favourite rides(along with BTM) and I was nervous what my friend thought about it....she LOVED it It had been closed for the past 11 days so we were happy that it was open and beautifully decorated for Christmas. They changed the music a little bit, alternating Christmas songs with the usual IASM music.

Next was 'Pirates of the Carribbean', the board outside said 70 minutes and we hoped the were exaggerating just like on the previous ride, however it did take us 60 minutes to reach the front of the queue and we were a bit done at that point, the darkness and heat didn't help but we enjoyed the ride and didn't get wet.
I was a bit sad to see that a few of the animatronics were missing, for example the dog who's got the keys in its mouth...you can still hear 'him' barking and see the pirates trying to attract him but he's not there...

Printed on the receipt from lunch was a voucher for one free hot drink so we decided to take a quick break in the afternoon and headed to the 'Hakuna Matata' restaurant to redeem a free hot chocolate and bought one coffee, it was nice to take a break and the hot chocolate was really nice.(the same one they have at the hotel breakfast)

The Hakuna Matata restaurant is right by the 'Junglebook' character meet area and while we were having our drinks the characters swapped over to Rafiki and Timon and we joined the queue for them.
I stood next to Rafiki and the photographer counted down 3, 2, 1 and when he got to 1 Rafiki took a step forward and banged the stick on the floor so now it looks like I didn't want to stand next to him in the picture.

We went to see the 'Once upon a Dream' Parade at 5pm by the exit to Adventureland, we had a pretty bad spot but didn't really care too much, at least we still got to see it

Next we got on the train at Frontierland Station and rode to Main Street, lovely and relaxing. I had brought some glow sticks for us and we turned them into bracelets, we got lots of looks.

We arrived at Main Street Station at exactly 6pm, when the Christmas tree lighting took place. Being 'behind' the tree meant we were missing out on the little character show but we still got to enjoy the lights.

Afterwards some shopping on Main Street and by 7pm we were DONE, we had both woken up with a sore throat that day(which I'm sure the children gave to us) and we'd been awake for 13 hours now, so in the end we just sat down outside the Main Street shops an hour before the Fantillusion Parade eating sweets *ha*. I never stake out a spot this early but I was getting grumpy and didn't feel like doing anything else at this point.
The next hour went by pretty quickly actually and we tried not to let other people's rude behaviour bother us too much.
The parade started at 8pm and it was AMAZING, we loved it.

A lot of people were leaving the park after the parade and despite being tired and hungry we decided to stay a little longer and went over to Frontierland to ride Big Thunder Mountain one more time-this time in the dark.
Like I said before, I love this ride and am very sad it will be closed next year when I'm in Florida.
The queue said 35 minutes and we ended up waiting 40.

While we stood in the queue lots of people were staring at our glowstick bracelets, which at this point we had hung on our bags. There was one little girl in particular who couldn't keep her eyes off them. She never said a word but I decided to give her my bracelets, she was over the moon. A few minutes later my friend gave her her two bracelets as well and she now had 4 different colours The look on that little girls' face was priceless and when we left the park a little while later we passed her and her dad and she was still clutching the bracelets.

Anyway, BTM was awesome in the dark and we laughed like crazy throughout the entire ride.

After that it was time to leave and find some dinner. From my last vists I still had fond memories of Annette's in the Village, so that's where we headed. We had to wait about 30 minutes for a table but it was worth it.
The cheeseburger was very good and I enjoyed the vanilla diet coke.

We paid and headed over to the bus stop, where we arrived at 11:30 only to see a little sign saying the last bus left at 11:30 so we were worried we had just missed it as we were the only people at the bus stop. We were just about to go find a taxi when a bus pulled up at 11:40
We went to bed at midnight and had been awake for 18 hours and in Parc Disney for 13.5 of those!

 

[DLPdaft]

another great day, really enjoying reading this, and I'm impressed at how well you did on a long busy Saturday .

 

[Rienchen]

another great day, really enjoying reading this, and I'm impressed at how well you did on a long busy Saturday .

Thank you for reading along.
We're headed to WDW next May for 10 nights and I'm planning another TR then, so this short weekend away was good practice

 

[megarasweet]

This is one of my favourite new trip reports, I love your photos.

That's certainly a long day you had, you've spurred me on to make the effort to get up early for EMH this year!

 

[Rienchen]

This is one of my favourite new trip reports, I love your photos.

That's certainly a long day you had, you've spurred me on to make the effort to get up early for EMH this year!

Thank you so much, I feel loved
Sorry that there are so many pictures of me

Getting up at 6am was definitely worth it, if only for getting to ride Dumbo on our own.
Thinking back now we should have gone on Buzz one more time and not wasted the last 30 minutes of EMH doing our shopping.

I don't think I'll get part 3 up tonight but will definitely do it before the end of the week.

 

[tinks_1989]

Thanks for reading, are you excited about your next trip? We saw a few characters interact with tiny babies and it melted our hearts. Are you taking Elise back to DLP or WDW?

Yes thank you very excited about our next trip we only have three days in the park and Elsie has 7 costumes lol we have to choose which ones to take! Back to Disneyland I hope one day we can go back to WDW!


Loved day two you are Heros staying at the park that long

 

[tinkertaylor05]

Loving the trip reoprt and all your photos

 

[Rienchen]

Sunday and today was our last day

EMH was Parc Disney again but because we didn't actually get to sleep until after midnight and because only a few rides were open during EMH we decided to sleep in and then go back to the Studios.

Our alarms went off at 8am and we went to check-out of the hotel around 9. Minnie Mouse was taking pictures in the reception area and both of us were very excited and just about ready to join the queue when she left and Goofy came along. According to the little poster on display the two characters were taking turns until 11:30
We didn't really want to meet Goofy so decided to have breakfast first as we thought by the time we were done with that Minnie would be back.But first we took our suitcases over to the luggage storage as our train back home wasn't until later that day. Surprisingly this didn't cost anything.

Breakfast was busy and we had to walk around for a bit before finally finding a table.
We had some rolls, croissants and hot chocolate...I LOVED the hot chocolate, especially because I usually have the wieght watchers kind at home, so this was SO much nicer ;-)

After breakfast we headed back into the reception to see if Minnie was back...she was but we were out of luck again as they were just switching over to Goofy again. Ah well.
According to the park program she was also doing a meet at the studios, so we were going to try and meet her there.

The shuttle bus was standing outside the hotel already but it was very crowded so we decided to wait for the next one, which was 10 minutes later. We finally got to the studios at 10:20 and it took another 10 minutes until we were inside as it was pretty crowded today.

We headed straight over to the 'Lights, Motor, Action!' Stuntshow as it was due to start at 11 and the program said to arrive 30 minutes early. We got some good seats in the center section but didn't really need to arrive quite that early, but I guess we didn't have enough time to do anything else.
I really enjoyed the stunt show and it didn't feel like 45 minutes at all. I had seen it in Florida before but hadn't seen the new 'CARS' part in it, which I guess was good to keep the children entertained and interested.

Next we walked over to 'Toon Plaza' to meet Minnie Mouse followed by a meet with Sully Monster from Monsters Inc near the Animagique building. He was awesome!

I really do love these orderly queues to meet the characters.

Afterwards we decided to go see Animagique again because we loved it so much on Friday, it was just as awesome as the first time, I still don't know what film those giant pink elephants are from.

It was soon lunchtime and we went over to Disney Village, where I managed to convince my friend to try out the Earl of Sandwich, I have got this one picked for my trip to WDW next Spring and was looking forward to trying it out beforehand.
Lunch here was quite expensive, €24 for the two of us.
J had a tuna melt, a diet coke and a fruit cup
I had the jerk chicken, a water and a bread pudding
OMG everything was soooo good, especially the bread pudding. I can't wait to go back here next year even though I know it's poor value on the dining plan. They actually have a location in London, so I might have to go and get my bread pudding fix sometime soon

At this point we had about three more hours for the parks and we decided to go back into the Studios to see what the wait was for Crush and/or Parachute drop.

Crush was 120 minutes, so we decided that was too long, Parachute drop said 50 minutes and while that's longer than I usually like to queue we had nothing else to do and joined the queue.
Had a lovely conversation with a French family in front of us and after 60 minutes it was finally our turn.
I have to say that this is an awesome ride. I'm not one for big thrill rides so will never do a big free fall ride, but this one is just perfect for me.

We didn't feel like doing any more queueing afterwards and headed slowly back to the hotel after another stop in the disney shops. We both brought back some presents for the little girls we nanny for.
I went for a fridge magnet each, some chocolate coins and each of my girls also got a park map, while this doesn't cost anything, they both love it

We went back to collect our suitcases at the hotel and got to the train station much too early, we picked up some supplies for the train and spent a few € on sweets and other must haves ;-) before making our way to the Eurostar level for the 19:37 direct train back to London. The queue was already quite long so we just joined it as it seemed to be moving slowly.
We soon found out that the train would be delayed, which didn't help improve people's moods.

We ended up leaving Paris about 30 minutes late because the train had arrived late into Paris.
About 30-45 minutes into the journey the train stopped and we were told that this was due to a red signal, a few minutes later they said that we stopped because the train in front of us had hit some sort of animal. The train manager was totally honest and said he didn't know how long we'd be waiting for.
In the end we were 2 hours delayed and they offered free drinks(alcohol free) and started making arrangements for taxis and hotels. We missed the last train home but arranged to be picked up by my friend's fiance, so that was good.

We arrived into St Pancras around 23:15 and had to clear passport control first as they don't do this on the train/at Disney anymore, so this added a little bit of time to our journey.

We were very impressed with the behaviour of the children in our carriage, despite the journey taking a good 4 hours they were all pretty quiet.
I was back home around 0:30 and fell into bed.

What a fun weekend, I can't believe I hadn't been to Disneyland Paris in almost 10 years, I'll definitely visit again soon!

Thanks for reading along, 5 more months until my trip to Florida, hope to have you all back for that one!

Did me fulfil our goal of meeting Mary Poppins? Sadly we didn't, the parades were as close as we got to her and Bert, it would have been fun to get some childcare tips from her ;-)

 

[tinks_1989]

SundayI still don't know what film those giant pink are from?

I havent seen animagique but I have seen a picture aren't they the hefalumps from pooh bears nightmares hefalumps and woozals (sp? :/)

 

[DLPdaft]

they're from Dumbo - when Dumbo gets a little tipsy on champagne he sees quite a lot of pink elephants .

 

[tinks_1989]

they're from Dumbo - when Dumbo gets a little tipsy on champagne he sees quite a lot of pink elephants .

oh yeah so it is i just watched both songs. Very strange Elsie enjoyed them though!

pooh bear

Dumbo

 

[Rienchen]

oh yeah so it is i just watched both songs. Very strange Elsie enjoyed them though!

pooh bear

Dumbo

Thanks for those, yes seems like they are the Dumbo elephants.

*****

The weekend at DLP has really got me excited about my trip to WDW next year and I still can't think of a good reason why I stayed away from DLP for so long as my last visit was January 2002