Day Trip - Disneyland Paris

We had decided on one day trip out of Paris - and despite my cultural pretensions, Disneyland Paris won out over Versailles. Who am I kidding - was it even close?! My logic is that the kids would enjoy Disneyland very much at this age - and Versailles has been there for centuries. They can wait to see it on their next trip ;)

We hopped the RER A to the park - it was all very convenient. The only mar on the day was that it was pouring. It continued to rain on and off until about 4 pm that day. We were all soaked - our shoes would squelch a little as we walked and my jeans managed to dye my shoelaces blue due to all the rain.

The park was very beautiful (even in the rain). It seemed to have more open areas built in, with wider walkways, so it never seemed to be too crowded. Sleeping Beauty's castle was gorgeous - by far the prettiest Disney castle I've ever seen.

My kids have grown up going to a Disney park at least once a year, so they're pretty familiar with everything. The Paris park was lots of fun because even though it was very similar, it was fun to spot the differences. Some of them were somewhat predictable - the food (even at fast food outlets) was excellent, service was slow and relatively indifferent, smoking was allowed in the park, beer was served everywhere. There was such a blatant disregard of the rule against flash photography in dark rides that I began to wonder if that rule was suspended in Paris.

We especially enjoyed spotting the differences in our two favorite rides: Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. The Haunted Mansion was actually known as Phantom Manor and was really very changed in terms of setting to a Western theme. Pirates was still very similar although it harkened back to the old Californian version before they changed everything to make it more PC, i.e. pirates were still chasing wenches about as opposed to everything they added in CA to soften those scenes.

It's a Small World was also quite different - the most notable in my mind was that they had a whole scene on Thailand, not just two dancers mixed up with the Indonesian and perhaps Malay dancers that they have in the US. And the carousel had the most beautifully detailed horses - with Fantasyland (my favorite) being about twice the size as all the other lands.

Overall I thought the park was very pretty and whimsical, with lots of secret places to disperse the crowds. It was clearly set up for a much larger crowd than what we experienced - there were hardly any lines for anything, and we could see that the queue areas had been designed for much longer ones. Thank goodness - after our queue experiences of the prior day!

We had a full day there, finally leaving around 8:30 pm to catch the train back to Paris.