My Disneyland Paris Experience 2017 – Part 2

Hi guys, I’m back again for a second update on my Disneyland Paris Experience from this summer!

If you read my last post you know where I left off, if you didn’t go check it out! So let’s get straight back into it!

Once we hopped off the ferry we began our drive to Disney! After sleeping for a bit more on the coach at around 7AM we stopped off at a service station and headed inside to get dressed into our clothes for the day as we were all dressed in comfy clothes for the night trip. We arrived at Disneyland around 10.30AM and we waited around for our tickets, which was so hard! All we wanted to do was get in and get started, but finally we got into the park and began our big adventure about at around 11.30AM.

Our first day in Disney was definitely the most exhausting, after almost no sleep on the coach I was flagging already and it was only just lunch time. Luckily, every ride gave me a some energy that would almost last until the next one. As we wandered around the park it slowly began to get later, at 2PM we watched the parade from right outside the castle and sat in awe of the floats, dancers and princesses. We tried our best to meet as many as possible, especially our favourites! We met so many but for me all that mattered was meeting my favourites! I managed to meet Ariel and Eric (my personal favourites) so I was over the moon, and over the rest of the weekend met Merida, Rafiki, Snow White and also saw so may others like, Baloo, Rapunzel, Aladdin, Jasmine, and Goofy. If only I could have met them all….

Rides:

In terms of rides, I wish we had done more, but to go through such a huge park in such a short amount of time we prioritised the rides and made sure we went on our favourites, the ones we did manage to go on were;

-Space Mountain (Currently called ‘Hyperspace Mountain, and based upon Star Wars, which was so cool!)

-Big Thunder Mountain

-It’s A Small World

-Rocking Rollercoaster, with Aerosmith

-Crushes Coaster

-The Tower of Terror

-Peter Pan’s Flight

-Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril

-Phantom Manor

We went on some more but those were just a few of my favourites! Sadly ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ ride was closed for refurbishment, I imagine it was in time for the new film that had just come out. As that was one of my original favourites I was slightly sad but despite that we still had an incredible first day.

As we wandered around the park it became quite obvious to me that the Disneyland Paris park has a lot more characters and princesses dotted around the place in comparison to the Florida park. In terms of availability, the American park requires a longer official queue and even has a cut off I believe, whereas in Paris many of the characters don’t even have queues, they just pop up and whoever is around can swing by and grab a picture, hug and autograph!

The Disney Illuminations:

After a long day of wandering and trekking through the park, snacking on the classic park foods and going on countless rides, it came to my favourite part, the Disney Illuminations. If you don’t know what that is, trust me, you’re missing out! The huge castle in the middle of the park, is lit up once it gets dark, and a video is projected onto the entire castle. With Disney characters and songs every two seconds, you get to watch them dance around and interact with the audience and each other on one of the most extravagant light shows. With a huge fireworks display, and classic songs played through speakers it’s an incredible experience and one of my all time favourite parts of this trip, and any trip to Disney!

Once the illuminations finally ended, it was around midnight meaning we’d been up and awake for well over 24 hours now, it was safe to say we were all incredibly tired. We made our way back to the car park to get on the coach and finally head to the hostel we were staying in. After almost an hours journey we finally arrived and checked in. In terms of Hostels, this was by far the nicest one I had ever stayed in, if anyone is looking for a good hostel, definitely check out ‘The Generator Hostel’ chain! In a room of ten of us, we had one en-suite shower and one-ensuite toilet, luckily there were some communal ones down the hall. Despite it being incredibly late, we were all covered in sweat and suncream from the long day so majority of us showered before we went to bed and freshened up in preparation for the next day.

Eventually heading to bed at around 3AM, we set our alarms for 6AM so we could head downstairs for breakfast at 7AM. With only three hours sleep, tired was an understatement….

As you can tell, we had a pretty amazing first day, but keep an eye out for the next update: Day 2, the performance and final night!