Je Vais à Disneyland !

This is the plaza outside the entrance to Disney Parks, Paris photo by the author

That picture was taken on January 7, 2024, 25 kilometers East of Paris Centre-Ville. Yep, Disneyland Paris (and Walt Disney Studios) in January. Had a pretty good time, considering the weather, which kept getting colder as time passed. The feels like temperature got as low as 18.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Our puffy, cold-climate worthy coats never arrived from Nevada. Lined raincoats are good, but maybe not good enough. At least I had earmuffs!

It was the final day of the Holidays at Disney

his tree is just inside Disneyland, or was, that is. Disneyland is the same place, only different. Have another picture or two:

Top: Main Street; Bottom Frontierland

You’ll notice the Thunder Mountain Railroad in Frontierland. There is also a Mississippi steamboat, a really lame walk-through called “The Real Wild West,” restaurants, and maybe in summer those canoes, but I can’t say for sure. On Main Street you’re looking at the Emporium, which will be familiar if you’ve ever been to a Disneyland Magic Kingdom.

Amazingly, this park is 30 years old as of last year. (Guess that makes it 31 years old this year, huh?)

For lunch we found a place serving turkey legs with frites (fries, sorry) and soft drinks, and we ate outside. A bit cool, but not bad yet.

We got there at about noon, so after lunch we went on “It’s a Small World.”

I thought that the French were experts with topiary. This is one of the exhibits outside of the “Small World” entrance. Maybe I was wrong?

It hasn’t changed much since 1965, but here there is a small “American” section, consisting of a couple of NFL fans and the Hollywood sign in a high alcove. The default language, as in all of this park, is of course French. Most attractions also present in English.

This was the first Disney attraction I ever rode on, in 1965, Flushing Meadows, New York. It still gets me every time because it makes me feel the way I felt in 1965, which was excellent, and born of sheer naiveté. After this, we went looking for Tomorrowland.
Which isn’t there. Instead, we found Discoveryland, a Jules Verne themed area.

You can put Deepl/Google away. It says, “Whatever is within the limits of possibility is and will be accomplished.” It’s been trendy of late to credit Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, with inventing Science Fiction, but hers was more of speculative/fantasy. Verne was an educator, and you can learn the state of scientific knowledge of his time by reading his books. He invented classical Science Fiction, later developed by Asimov, Heinlein, and their peers. France is justly proud of what he accomplished.

Here’s an photo of Discoveryland:

It has Hyperspace Mountain, a Spiderman web-shooting ride, and some things that looked frankly worthy of le vomit!

Well, we were back the next day, and it was 5 below zero Celsius, which is 23 degrees Fahrenheit, which is too cold for a lined raincoat, but that’s what we had. We spent the morning on a couple of attractions, including a roller coaster in the dark (bad idea for an old guy) and a space adventure ride (Star Tours, for which they made a new script, bless them.)

That’s the roller coaster in the dark, Avengers themed. Heck, go for it

We went back to the hotel and sat in a hot tub for a couple of hours, coming back for dinner at Captain Jack’s, right next to Pirates of the Caribbean. Same song, a bit longer ride. Captain Jack’s serves good seafood, and takes a couple of hours to do it. Hey, it is a French restaurant!

Pirates of the Carribean is longer, but still has Captain Sparrow in it. It has not been edited to fit contemporary American tastes, so the wife sale is still on.

Captain Jack’s. Note how those people are dressed. They did a good business in character themed fuzzy hats!

After that we went back to the hotel. On the way our, we caught a bit of the final Holiday Parade of the season:

The next day, tired of freezing in Disney, we went into the city (Paris) and discovered that we needed to have advance tickets for Saint Chappelle, so to stop freezing in Paris, we had a most excellent steak dinner for lunch, went back to the hotel, and ate complementary beverages and snacks until it was time to return to the station to catch our train (more or less) home. I leave you with the following photograph of what was happening weather-wise as we waited for the shuttle to the station:

The snow stuck to the streets, even. It did not snow in Lizant until the next afternoon. It all melted the day after that.

One big difference between France and the US is that we live five hours by car (on excellent roads with 80 mph speed limits) from Disneyland Paris, but the train from Poitiers gets there in about two hours. Nice. (Yeah, Poitiers is an hour away, but that’s still two hours faster, innit?) If you like Disney stuff, I recommend these parks. But, if we go back, it will most likely be in May or October. I’m tired of being cold, folks!