Disneyland Paris tips

[Locoboy5150]

I will *FINALLY* complete the number one bucket list item in my life and that is to visit all of the Disney theme parks in the world. The covid-19 pandemic pushed back the last trip that I had to take to check off that last Disney park on my list but I am currently planning to visit Disneyland Paris finally later this year. I have never been there before so does anyone have any tips and/or suggestions on what to do and see either at the park or around the Disneyland Paris Resort area that you could please share? My family and I are all ears!

[CP173]

Congratulations, LocoBoy! Disneyland Paris is a great park and I'm sure you'll have a good time. Here are a few tips that I'd follow if I were to return there:

1. Skip the Studios. If you absolutely must go, just go on the Ratatouille ride. Everything else is a waste of time.
2. Watch the wait times for the Railroad. It's a great ride, but they often only run one train and it can easily be an hour+ wait. Could be easier to get on first thing.
3. Explore. Disneyland Paris isn't like Disneyland in that they spread things out a bit more, and some things aren't as obvious. Ex: their Casey Jr. ride (really a roller coast) is off on its own and would be easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. The dragon beneath the castle would be very easy to overlook, and it's awesome.
4. Lower your expectations. Unless things have changed in the last 5 years, DLP is a messy park. People just drop everything everywhere, and the CM's don't seem eager to clean it up.
5. Start with the hub and work your way around from there. Unlike Disneyland, they provided a lot more walkways among the lands, so you can totally bypass the hub and miss it. Which is a shame, because it is laid out so well.

Overall DLP is charming and well worth the visit. The Studios is like the worst Paul Pressler-era junk except for one ride... which is good, but not worth a Park Hopper to visit.

Bon Voyage!

[Steve DeGaetano]

Awesome Locoboy! Take pictures!

[Steve]

Take pictures!

And tell us all about it when you get back, too!

[Locoboy5150]

Thank you for the tips about Disneyland Paris. I am still in the planning stages of my trip so the excitement is still building. This is a lot of fun because it has been a few years since I went to a new-to-me Disney theme park so I am really enjoying doing all the research and watching videos about the Disneyland Paris Resort.

[Cannonball7]

I last visited DLP in 2019. I found the park to be a cross between Disneyland in Anaheim and the Magic Kingdom in WDW. The scale more mirrors Disneyland, but it is spread out more like WDW. You should have an amazing time...as long as you are OK with everything being just slightly different than those attractions here in the US.

The DLRR is awesome. You'll quickly realize its priority with park management by the hours it operates, the number of trains on the line, and overall appearance of the engines. That being said, it is good right through the woods that surround the park.

Enjoy your trip!

[Locoboy5150]

I got back from my two week long trip to Disneyland Paris and Switzerland on 6-23-23. My family and I had an absolutely fantastic time! Thank you everyone for your tips and tricks about the Disneyland Paris Resort. They were very helpful.

I'll post a more detailed report on my opinions of the two parks over there and my overall impressions of them in this thread so stay tuned.

[Locoboy5150]

Here is a trip report about my vacation that I posted to several message boards. Note that I tried to write it for Disney park/train/roller coaster fans so I skipped all of other things that we saw and did that did not cater to those specific crowds.

Well, my family and I are finally home after a long two and a half week vacation to Paris and Switzerland. We left San Francisco International Airport early Friday morning, 6-9-23, and had about a three hour layover in Toronto International Airport. For the fellow Rush fans out there, Toronto’s airport has the call sign “YYZ.” That should be instantly recognizable as the name of one of the band’s most iconic instrumental pieces from the “Moving Pictures” album. I have to admit that I had that piece playing in my mind constantly during those three hours. Unfortunately, it was not available on my plane’s music play list though. (Way to blow it Air Canada!) They did have one Rush song in there though, “Working Man.” Even though it was not “YYZ,” I still played it throughout my plane’s descent and landing. It was impossible to not be in a Rush kind of mood for the whole first leg of our flight.

After hanging out at YYZ (I looked for a shirt with “YYZ” on it to no avail) and grabbing a bite to eat there, then we started the final and longest leg of our journey, the flight to Paris’ Charles De Gaulle Airport. After that marathon flight, we arrived in Paris for the first time on Saturday morning, 6-10-23. We were all very tired from the flight but ecstatic to be at the start of yet another adventure into (for us) uncharted waters.

Our first night in the Paris area was actually outside of the Disneyland Paris Resort. We knew well in advance that we were not going to Disneyland Paris (DLP) or Walt Disney Studios (WDS) on that first Saturday because we all would be dead tired and that both parks would be extremely crowded, so we booked our first room just outside of the resort at a nice hotel in the city of Marne la Vallee near the shopping mall Val d’Europe. The hotel was called Hotel L’Elysee and it was very nice with fantastic air conditioning, which I would later find out was a rarity on this trip.

One of the other reasons why we stayed off-site that first Saturday night was because of the rather unusual booking procedure for hotels on the DLP Resort property. At least for people making hotel reservations in the US, I found that park admission tickets were automatically provided for every day of your reservation. Thus, if I booked a hotel on-site for that first Saturday, it would also automatically include admission tickets for that day, a day that we would not be visiting any of the parks. Also, the hotel prices for Saturday were way out of our budget and our room at Hotel L’Elysee was much less than a Saturday night stay at any of the Disneyland Paris Resort hotels.

That first night we all went to bed early and got a really good night’s sleep. That was important because we were going to wake up extremely early on Sunday morning, check out of Hotel L’Elysee, check into our room at our DLP Resort on-site hotel (Newport Bay Club,) and head into one of the two theme parks. That was a lot to do in just one morning! Somehow, we managed to do it all without any problems though. Jet lag definitely worked in our favor on that Sunday morning and all throughout our time at the DLP Resort because we never had any problems with waking up very early during our stay there.

The walk from Hotel L’Elysee to Newport Bay Club took about 25 minutes and it was pretty easy to find our way around on the sidewalks of Marne la Vallee, which is the actual city that the DLP Resort is located in. For those that do not know, DLP is actually located quite a distance away from Paris. We used a ride share service to take us from the airport in Paris to Hotel L’Elysee and the drive took about thirty to forty five minutes without any traffic. Given how congested Paris can be, I was very grateful that DLP was built pretty far from the center of the city.

We chose a ride sharing service rather than public transportation because many of the trains and subways in Paris have a terrible reputation for pick pockets and for tourists having their luggage stolen. I had read numerous reports online of fellow Americans starting out their DLP vacations that awful way and we wanted to avoid kicking off our adventure on the wrong foot. If crime was not a concern, we would probably have seriously considered taking the TGV train from the airport since it has a station right at the DLP Resort and it only takes about fifteen minutes to get there.

Our hotel at the DLP Resort, Newport Bay Club, was very nice but also not exactly what I’d call “cheap.” As with all on-site Disney theme park hotels, with the Newport Bay Club you pay for the convenient location close to the theme parks. Also, and I do not know if this is a major problem or not at DLP, but if you book a hotel room on-site you are guaranteed to have a park reservation throughout your stay. I have not heard a lot of stories about people being unable to secure a park reservation at DLP like at Disneyland (DL,) but I did not want to risk going all the way to Paris and being locked out of the parks at the last minute. Thus, I bit the bullet and booked our room at Newport Bay Club before our trip.

The room was nice but not exceptional. It did not have a refrigerator or a microwave. It did have A/C, which might not seem like a big deal but many hotel rooms in Paris do not. Now, I should have said that the room had “A/C” because that would have been more accurate. We noticed that throughout our time at DLP, the A/C systems (including the ones at Newport Bay Club) were either woefully inefficient or not turned down to a low enough temperature setting. It is not really humid in Paris but compared to the Bay Area, every place on the planet is “humid” in the summer. Thus, though everyone else was just fine at DLP, we were almost always hot. No matter where we went indoors, be it the main lobby of Newport Bay Club, the Emporium store on Main Street, or Phantom Manor, we found that the A/C systems were nowhere near as cold as those in all of the other Disney theme park properties. Thus, that summertime tradition of walking into DL’s Haunted Mansion and saying “Ahhhhhh” as soon as you felt the cool A/C in the foyer simply does not happen when you walk into DLP’s Phantom Manor’s foyer.

That lack of A/C power was obvious in our room of the Newport Bay Club. The A/C was working just fine but the thermostat on the wall could only be set to a minimum of 20 degrees C, which is 68 degrees F. Everyone else in the world would be perfectly fine with the thermostat set at 68 degrees but for us weather wimps from the Bay Area that are used to saying “Ahhhhh,” we prefer it much colder than that in the summer. I have read similar reports from other Disney fans about their hotel rooms’ weak A/C systems in all of the other on-site DLP hotels too.

After settling into our hotel room, we explored around the DLP Resort a little. The shopping district is called Disney Village and it is nice but a bit small compared to Downtown Disney or Disney Springs. It is a little bigger than Disneytown though. One thing about Disney Village is that if you are looking for French food, you can pretty much forget about it. Most of the restaurants there are common American food chains like McDonald’s, Five Guys, Rainforest Café, and Earl Of Sandwich. Earl Of Sandwich came in handy though because we walked right by it every night on our way back to Newport Bay Club and thus we always grabbed a quick bite to take back to our room for breakfast the following morning. We often grabbed the most “authentically French” food for breakfast – fruit salads and croissants. They served their purpose of quickly filling us up before heading out to the parks in the early morning.

While on the subject of food, DLP is really not a “foodies park” like some of the other Disney theme parks like DL, Walt Disney World (WDW,) or Tokyo Disneyland (TDL.) DLP has OK to good food but nothing uniquely French. There is the Chez Remy restaurant in WDS that serves French cuisine, but we were not able to get a reservation for a table there to experience it for ourselves. Thus, we often grabbed a bite to eat in Disney Village at Earl Of Sandwich and even at McDonald’s once.

There are some nice places to eat in DLP, but they were often frustratingly closed throughout our trip though. (We spent one day at WDS and three days at DLP.) We really wanted to eat fish and chips at Toad Hall Restaurant in Fantasyland, but it was almost always closed. We kept checking on its status every day and the doors were always locked…except for on our very last day at DLP and then it finally opened without notice. I only found out about it opening that day when a tourist (from the UK) waiting at a table outside the locked doors informed me that a Cast Member told him that it would be opening later that day at 11:00 AM, which it did.

One of the restaurants that we were planning to try was Pizzeria Bella Notte in Fantasyland, but it was never open. One restaurant that we were very fortunate to find open starting at 11:00 AM every day though was Restaurant Hakuna Matata in Adventureland. I had read that that place was almost never open, but I guess that we got really lucky. We also really liked the African style food that they served there and, as an added bonus, we ate at a table that was in a separate little “nook” away from the rest of the dining room and there was a huge A/C vent in that little “nook.” That was one of the only times that we were really comfortable, temperature-wise, anywhere indoors at DLP. It was a nice break in the middle of the day when the park was busy and humid.

Also, one of the things that is rather frustrating about eating at DLP is that many of the restaurants open late at around 11:000 AM and close early at around 5:00 PM. The park hours on all three days we were there were 9:30 AM to 11:00 PM. (WDS opened at the same time but closed at 10:00 PM.) I do not know if the limited restaurant availability has to do with staffing problems but based on what I read from other Disney fans online before our trip, short restaurant operating hours are quite common all throughout DLP and all year long. Just be aware that if you go to DLP, be fully prepared to eat dinner at Disney Village at a common restaurant (like McDonald’s) that is a ten minute drive away from your house because all of the restaurants in DLP that you want to try are closed up for the night.

The delayed openings for the restaurants were not too much of a problem for us but we usually eat lunch early at Disney parks to avoid the crowds and, since many of the restaurants at DLP did not open until 11:00 AM, that usually meant that we had to wait in a little queue just to get inside the restaurants because they were not open yet. We just got used to waiting in queues a little before 11:00 AM though. All of the restaurants were large enough to swallow up all of the fellow early lunch eaters as soon as the doors were opened though, so it was never a big problem.

So, what park do we kick off our trip with? Do we start off at DLP, the one DL-style “castle park” that I have lusted after ever since I first saw it on TV when it opened in 1992…the last park that I had to visit in order to complete the number one item on my bucket list to visit every single Disney theme park on the planet? No…we kicked off our trip by visiting what is generally regarded as, by far, the worst Disney theme park on the planet, WDS! What better way to start off our vacation with a bang than by visiting the worst park in the chain, right?

I have read just about everything about WDS ever since it first opened and most of it was bad news. Could a theme park really be that bad? I went to California Adventure (CA Adv) countless times in its early days and surely no park could be as bad as that one…right? Well, I kept an open mind when I went to WDS and I am pleased to report that, at least in this one guy’s opinion, it is not really all that bad. Is it great? No…certainly not. It is not as good as CA Adv 1.0 (before the Buena Vista Street addition) but I generally did not think that it was pure stink-a-tude like I had read online countlessly.

Now, before people out there fry their keyboards with their hot morning coffee from laughing themselves silly due to me sticking up for WDS, let me state clearly that it is not a very good park to me either. I just have to admit that all of us had a fun time there. We spent a full day there and, due to the crowds, we never ran out of things to do and see. Of course, it was no DisneySea (DS) but I still had fun at WDS and in the end that is what really matters to me whenever I visit any theme/amusement park.

The highlight of WDS for us was Ratatouille The Adventure, the first version of the trackless dark ride that is also now open at Epcot’s France pavilion. I have never ridden the one at Epcot so I do not know if the WDS version is any different. We all enjoyed it a lot. There were a bit too many screens for my tastes but overall it was a really enjoyable ride that we rode three times throughout the day. I am glad that we watched Ratatouille before our trip so we were all familiar with the characters and story. My son could not resist buying a plush Remy and a small battery operated model of the rat-themed ride vehicle at the gift shop.

The other attraction that I was really looking forward to riding was Twilight Zone Tower Of Terror (TOT,) which is basically the same ride as the one at CA Adv before it was converted to Guardians Of The Galaxy (GotG) Mission Breakout a few years ago. It was fun going back in time to experience the original CA Adv version of this ride that I rode countless times plus there were some new additions that were added to the WDS version. I was not aware that they added some projections of the little girl from the pre-show to the elevator doors. They also added sound effects of her voice speaking to us during the ride, which was a nice touch. I was initially not a huge fan of changing the one at CA Adv to make it Guardians themed, but now that I have experienced them both (and now all of the Tower Of Terrors around the world) I have a completely new perspective of GotG. I like how it is completely unique now. I now have an option if I want to relive my CA Adv memories of TOT and it is at WDS. I now like having more options available to me and other fans rather than simply cloning the rides to other parks.

Other highlights at WDS were Avengers Assemble Flight Force, which was a retheme of Rock n Roller Coaster. I enjoyed the ride even though it was the exact same launched Vekoma coaster as Rock n Roller Coaster, just with Avengers themeing. The other highlight of the park was Web Slingers, which was the exact same as the one at CA Adv. It was fun but I had a hard time slinging my webs at the spider bots accurately for some reason. Maybe I am just getting too old for these “video game” attractions because my son did not seem to have any problems!

One attraction that surprised me in how much I enjoyed it was Crush’s Coaster. It is just a spinning coaster from Maurer but both my son and I really liked how it started out as a dark ride first before the high speed roller coaster sections. We liked it so much that we rode it twice. My wife could only handle one ride on it and, because of the spinning, she passed on riding it again.

In the late afternoon after about 5:00 PM the park really started to empty out. A small storm rolled in during the afternoon and maybe the rain chased people away. That was the time when we went over to the most crowded section of the park, Avengers Campus, and rode the Marvel themed attractions that I previously mentioned. I had read that WDS was a “half day park” and based on how empty it became with several hours to go until closing (the park closed at 10:00 PM) that seemed to be the case. That was fine with us because we had fun walking around WDS crowd-free. The park was generally quite busy that Sunday though and it seemed much busier than some of my summer Sundays at CA Adv when that park first opened. Despite the bad reviews of WDS, the park definitely has its fans based on what we experienced. As an example of how empty the park became later in the day, the wait for Crush’s Coaster was hovering around 80 to 90 minutes earlier in the day but by the late afternoon it was down to just 25 minutes.

The posted wait time for Web Slingers was also 25 minutes that late afternoon but we waited only about 15 minutes. Avengers Campus was so deserted by that time, the Cast Members (CMs) at Avengers Assemble Flight Force were allowing people to immediately ride again by going through one of the side exit doors that led right back to the boarding platform. I quickly rode it twice in a row because of that handy short cut.

We did not eat anything in WDS so I really do not know what the restaurants are like. We did not find anything to our liking in the park so we ate lunch and dinner at Disney Village that Sunday. The park does seriously need more sit down restaurants though. Many of the “restaurants” listed in the park map are actually simple food trucks sprinkled throughout the park.

While WDS is not a top tier park to say the least, it is worth visiting once in my opinion. As I have heard before from other Disney fans, the park’s best attraction is Ratatouille, hands down. The Paris themed section of that part of the park is so well done (on par with Epcot’s France pavilion) that it seems very jarring compared to the rest of WDS that has the cheap stucco building look of real movie studios.

WDS suffers from the exact same problem that all Hollywood movie studio style parks suffer from in my opinion. The movie studio theme was really neat and exciting once…back when Universal Studios Hollywood opened and it was the only game in town. Now there are countless movie studio theme parks around the world and the idea has become so old and tired. The whole concept really needs to be put to rest in my opinion. The simple truth is that real movie studios look flat out cheap and ugly. The movie magic that takes place within them is jaw droppingly beautiful but their exteriors are just not nice to look at to my eyes. That same paradox (ugly outside, beautiful inside) is apparent at WDS. The attraction exteriors are just not nice looking but some of the rides within are pretty good. Crush’s Coaster is a perfect example of that with a fairly plain Stucco exterior within plain sight of guests but a pretty well themed seaside interior. (Note that Ratatouille is a notable exception to this paradox because it looks beautiful both outside and inside.)

I just wish that theme park companies would get over the movie studio themeing and never revisit it. The only park that pulls it off OK is the original Universal Studios in Southern California and that is because it is the only movie studio theme park that is an actual operating movie studio. Now that I think about it, I have never thought that Universal Studios Hollywood was a very attractive park either. Poor WDS also suffers from being located next door to one of the most beautiful theme parks on the planet, DLP. Thank goodness Oriental Land Company (OLC,) owners of the Tokyo Disneyland Resort, completely rejected Disney’s first proposal for the second gate park in Japan – a version of Disney-MGM Studios from WDW. OLC was unimpressed with that park and its stale theme and went with DS instead and us Disney fans are eternally grateful. But…we’re not in Tokyo so back to Paris and DLP was the next park that we visited.

Ah, DLP…the most lambasted Disney theme park in America. Ever since it opened in 1992 as Euro Disneyland, I have read countless negative reports about the park in the news media and amongst the general public. Most of the reports were related to the park’s incredibly high cost to build and how it nearly bankrupted the Walt Disney Company. Now that the truth has come out many years later, that incredibly high initial price tag was why Disney was cutting costs at all of the other parks, including all of the new parks that were built after DLP opened like CA Adv, Animal Kingdom, Hong Kong Disneyland, and WDS. Thankfully, DS was the lone exception to this massive budget cutting going on at Disney. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, thank goodness for OLC!)

One thing that I have noticed over the years was that almost every negative comment about DLP was made by an American that had never actually set foot inside the park. They were all analyzing it from all the way over in America. Thus, I always kept an open mind about the park all these years since 1992. I had read all sorts of glowing reviews of DLP from fellow Disney fans that had been there many times so I was very afraid that it would be over-hyped in my mind and never live up to those glowing reports that I had read and heard. So, the big question in my mind was, will I be disappointed in DLP? I would find out soon.

Since we were staying at Newport Bay Club, an on-site hotel, we were allowed to enter both WDS and DLP an hour before opening time. That meant that we entered both parks at 8:30 AM. One thing that I discovered about the DLP guests is that they are not early risers at all. I am used to going to TDL where guests line up at the Main Gate at least two or three hours before the park opens. Even DL has a large crowd gathering at its Main Gate about an hour and a half before opening during busier seasons like Christmas and summer. DLP though was completely different. We showed up at around 8:00 AM or 8:15 AM every day and we were one of the first dozen or so people in the parks. At the time that we got to the Main Gate, there were only about a dozen non-hotel guests that were waiting for the other turnstiles to open at the park’s official opening at 9:30 AM. Wow, what a difference compared to other Disney parks and their guests that show up before dawn!

Both WDS and DLP in general are “late risers” too. We were there at the beginning of the summer season in early June and both parks opened at 9:30 AM for everyone. That is an extremely late opening time compared to the opening times for other Disney parks in the busy summer season. I am used to DL’s 8:00 AM opening times. Considering that it was summer, I also thought that both parks closed pretty early too. WDS closed at 10:00 PM and DLP closed at 11:00 PM.

At DL, the early morning entry can be hit or miss in terms of its value for hotel guests and holders of multi-day tickets. Since there is always such an early arriving crowd at DL, often the rides that are open for the early entry guests are pretty busy already. That was definitely not the case at DLP though. Thankfully, DLP guests do not arrive very early so we never had any problems with riding all of the big name attractions during the one hour early morning entry. All of the attractions that we rode during the early morning entry were about a five minute wait at the most. Most of them were complete walk-ons.

So, if you are staying on-site at DLP, my suggestion is to let jet lag work in your favor and show up early and take full advantage of DLP guests being late risers. One thing that worked against us getting to the parks as early as possible though was that the security check gates at Disney Village do not open until 7:45 AM. All on-site hotel guests have to walk through Disney Village to get to the parks so there is no advantage of getting to Disney Village before 7:45 AM because you will just be waiting for the security gates to open. Once again, everything at the DLP Resort opens very late, especially if you are used to all of the other Disney theme parks.

Also note that the Starbucks at Disney Village does not open until 8:00 AM. That is incredibly late for any Starbucks that I know of. People back home in the Bay Area would riot if their local Starbucks opened that late!

Also, the security check at the DLP Resort is quite different compared to at all of the other Disney parks. We always went through the security check at Disney Village and at the entrance they actually had airport style baggage scanners for all guests’ bags. They also made all guests walk through metal detectors. Just like always, my trusty Nikon F-100 raised all sorts of red flags almost every time that it went through the scanner. It has become so common for my camera to wake up the security people around the world that I am actually used to it now.

DLP’s gates opened at 8:30 AM sharp for on-site hotel guests and I was absolutely ecstatic on my first morning at the park. As soon as I made it through the turnstile, I immediately started to whoop and holler like a kid at homecoming. I could not believe that I actually did it. I finally completed my bucket list item of visiting all of the Disney theme parks around the world! I ran into Main Street just like a little kid – I could not help myself! My son joined in and started cheering too as he was running along with me down Main Street. My wife, embarrassed beyond belief to be related to us two nut cases, stayed in the background and pretended that she did not have any clue who we were. We’re at a Disney theme park so it’s 100% perfectly “normal” to throw your hands in the air and act like a kid! I have not changed a bit since I was a little kid at DL!

So, what did we ride first on our first morning at DLP? Why, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (BTMRR) in Frontierland of course! I have been reading about the DLP version of BTMRR ever since the park opened and everyone that has ridden it has said that it is, hands down, the best version of the mine train coaster in the world. It does not matter if they were a Disney fan, a roller coaster enthusiast, or both – everyone absolutely raves about the DLP BTMRR. I was so afraid that, after reading all those positively glowing reviews of it since 1992, it would never live up to the hype for me. I was so happy to finally experience it for myself but I have to admit that, before my first ride, I was really worried that it would be a massive let down too. All too often I have experienced other positively reviewed rides at other parks just not coming anywhere near those expectations for me before and I was so afraid that the DLP BTMRR would suffer that same miserable fate.

Well, I am ecstatic to report that the DLP BTMRR not only lived up to my lofty expectations, it absolutely shattered them to pieces after my very first ride on it! It is not just a fantastic Disney theme park roller coaster; it is just an absolutely fantastic roller coaster – period! I have watched and memorized so many on ride videos of it but videos do not do any justice to how fantastic BTMRR actually is.

For those that do not know, there is no Tom Sawyer’s Island at DLP. BTMRR is located where Tom Sawyer’s Island is at DL. Thus, BTMRR and not Tom Sawyer’s Island is surrounded by a big river that is circumnavigated by a steam boat. (At DLP the boat is named Molly Brown.) The cool thing is that BTMRR’s boarding station is located on the river’s outer bank, opposite from the mountain. The trains go out to and back from the big mountain via extremely long, underground tunnels that actually go completely underneath the river. I have seen many online videos of the DLP BTMRR over the years but absolutely none of them do any justice whatsoever to how completely insane those underground tunnels are! They are so pitch black inside that video cameras cannot show how fast the trains go through them. I remember putting my hands in front of my face in the tunnels and it was so dark in them that I could not see my hands at all…in the morning!

Now please keep in mind that when it comes to roller coaster tunnels, my standard for what makes a good tunnel is pretty high. I literally grew up riding the Giant Dipper at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and the pre-lift tunnel on that classic was always the most pitch black and insane coaster tunnel that I have ever experienced. After riding so many different roller coasters around the world, I had come to the conclusion that no tunnel could ever top the one on the Giant Dipper at my home park. (Though the tunnels on The Voyage at Holiday World are awesome too!) DLP’s BTMRR changed all that after just one ride.

Well, the Giant Dipper still has my favorite tunnel (partially due to its wonderful track grease-filled smell inside) but BTMRR’s tunnels are a pretty close second. (Note that they do not smell like track grease.) Videos of the tunnels do not show the whole story about their fabulousness. I had no idea that the tunnels are not straight. They actually have several high speed curves in them that do not show up in any videos. Also, incredibly, the longer tunnel on the return back to the boarding station actually has a gradual hill in it. The middle of that return hill is actually the lowest part of the coaster and thus the train absolutely hauls through the pitch black darkness. The amount of speed in that return tunnel is incredible and it totally took me by surprise on my first ride!

Also, though there is no “goat trick” after the second lift hill of DLP’s BTMRR like on DL’s, I am happy to report that there is a “rock trick” though. After the second lift hill of DLP’s BTMRR, there is a tall and skinny rock sticking up on the left side of the track. Just like on DL’s BTMRR with its goat, if you just stare at that tall rock throughout the ensuing drop off of the second lift hill, you’ll experience the exact same feeling that you do when you do the “goat trick” on DL’s BTMRR. It’s just a little different in Paris because the rock is on the left side of the track while in Anaheim the goat is on the right side of the track. I have always heard about the “goat trick” at DL but I have never read nor heard about the “rock trick” at DLP. If it becomes a “thing” amongst DLP fans, you read it here first!

After riding BTMRR, we rode all of the other E ticket attractions at DLP during the early morning entry (called Extra Magic Time) into the park over our three days there. Some of the highlights were Phantom Manor and Space Mountain, both of which were very different from the Haunted Mansions and Space Mountains at the other Disney theme parks. Space Mountain at DLP is a launched Vekoma coaster with inversions and it was the first one that I have ridden with the new Vekoma trains with vest style restraints. Though they were more comfortable than the older style Vekoma and Arrow Dynamics coaster trains with traditional shoulder restraints, I still much prefer simple lap bars. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Anton Schwarzkopf knew what he was doing!)

The early entry made it easy for us to ride all of the major attractions without waiting very long. The early morning ride time brought up one of my major complaints about DLP though. They do not publicize exactly which attractions will be opening up for the Extra Magic Time. I looked at the DLP website and at the DLP ap and neither one had a simple list of what would be open an hour early before the rest of the park. As an example of how this was kind of a pain was when I tried to ride the Indiana Jones looping Intamin coaster, located in Adventureland. It is at the very back corner of Adventureland, rather isolated from the rest of the park. I wasted a little bit of time hiking out to it one morning during Extra Magic Time, only to discover that it was closed until DLP opened at 9:30 AM. We also did the exact same thing one early morning when I only found out that Phantom Manor was not part of Extra Magic Time when we walked up to it only to learn that it was closed until DLP owned up to everyone. It was not a big deal in either case because we just rode both attractions later on without waiting when DLP opened at 9:30 AM, but it would have been nice to know about such closures before we were actually inside the park.

Speaking of the DLP website and ap, I also have to say that they both are not very good with up to date information. Before we even left home, I looked on the DLP website for an attraction refurbishment schedule. According to the site, no attractions were going to be down for refurbishment throughout our trip. That was most definitely not true however. Three of the attractions that we really wanted to see, Pirates of the Caribbean, La Taniere du Dragon, and Les Mysteres du Nautilus, were all closed for refurbishment throughout our trip. To make matters worse, the DLP ap simply listed all three attractions as just “closed,” which implied that they were just temporarily closed and might be opening up later in the day. It would have been nice for the ap to instead simply state “closed for refurbishment” to match the terminology that all of the other Disney theme parks use.

The ap also never mentioned the fact that Toad Hall Restaurant would be opening up at 11:00 AM on the last day of our three days at DLP, as I mentioned before. We only found out about that after another guest told me when he was waiting outside the restaurant for it to open that day. This simple up to date information is exactly why parks like DLP have completely gotten rid of paper maps and are forcing guests to use electronic medium instead. There are advantages to using aps and websites and their biggest benefit is the fact that they can be updated with the latest information. Sadly, that just does not happen at DLP. I guess that I have been completely spoiled by TDL and their online attraction refurbishment schedule that goes out to about two years in the future. DLP is an absolutely fantastic park but it has some operational issues like this (please no surprises for the guests) that make you scratch your head at times.

One of the attractions that we were really looking forward to riding was the DLP Railroad. I have not read too much about it so I was curious about what it was like. I had read reports of single train operation on the line but, thankfully, that was not the case throughout our trip. They were operating two trains on the line every day. The two 4-4-0 locomotives in operation were the C.K. Holliday and the G. Washington. We rode several times to give our tired feet a much needed rest and we were pulled by the C.K. Holliday every time, just due to pure luck.

For some reason, only Main Street Station and Frontierland Station were open throughout our trip. Both Fantasyland Station and Discoveryland Station were closed. I thought that they were being refurbished but I did not see any work being done on either station and they were not blocked from the park by any construction walls. They were both just closed and their queue entrances were simply chained off for some unknown reason.

One big operational difference between the DLPRR and all of the other Disney theme park railroads except for TDL’s Western River Railroad (which only has one station) is that you cannot camp out on the DLPRR and the Cast Members make you get off after one “Grand Circle Tour” around the park. We did not know about that on our first ride so we just remained seated when our train returned to Frontierland Station, even though everyone else around us got off. A DLPRR Cast Member kindly told us that we could not stay on though, but we could run around through the station and get back on quickly since there were not a lot of people waiting to board. We did that a few times and it was not a big deal.

At least while only the stations in Main Street and Frontierland are the only ones open on the DLPRR, most definitely board trains at Frontierland Station to avoid the crowds. Main Street Station was much busier all throughout our trip. Frontierland station is located at the very edge of Frontierland, completely isolated from guests’ view, so not many people walk all the way out there specifically to board the train like we did. The only time that that station attracted a huge crowd was when the Frontierland Theater opened its exit doors and people were leaving the “Rhythm of the Pridelands” show. (Yes, DLP has a Lion King show, which is very good, located in Frontierland. It made absolutely no sense to me, theme-wise!) Since the theater’s exit doors were almost right next to the station, many guests just jump right into the station’s queue as soon as they exit the theater since that is really the only time that they see Frontierland Station.

My suggestion is to only board the DLPRR at Frontierland Station and climb aboard before “Rhythm of the Pridelands” ends. If you get unlucky with your timing and just happen to get to Frontierland Station when guests are leaving the Frontierland Theater, just take a seat near the station where there are plenty of benches and wait for the train to swallow up all of those people. If there are two trains on the line, another one will be pulling into the station shortly so you can just get on that one instead with less people.

One thing that was really bad about the DLPRR, show-wise, was inside one of the tunnels along the line. That tunnel has big viewing windows that look into Pirates Of The Caribbean (POTC,) similar to how the Disneyland Railroad has windows that look into Splash Mountain. POTC was closed for refurbishment, which was annoying since we really wanted to ride it, but we understood. That was not the problem. The problem was that the viewing windows in the DLPRR tunnel were not covered up at all. As the train rolled by those uncovered windows, every passenger on the train could clearly see the construction workers working on POTC. To make matters worse, all of the bright work lights were turned on full blast! That was a perfect example of DLP completely blowing the show. I mean…come on! Every time Splash Mountain is closed for refurbishment, the windows in the Disneyland Railroad tunnel are fully covered up to preserve the show. If DL can do that, why can’t DLP? It was mind boggling.

One thing that we made sure to do was explore Sleeping Beauty Castle, or as the French call it, Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant. (They say it so romantically and effortlessly and always prove to me how rusty my French is!) The castle at DLP is simply jaw droppingly gorgeous from all angles and it has to be seen in person to be believed. Now that I have seen all of the Disney theme park castles in person, there is no doubt in my mind that DLP’s is my hands-down favorite. It is just so majestic! Also, there is a very simple way to improve anything in a theme park and that is by simply adding waterfalls to it. This has been proven over and over again at Disney theme parks around the world. Some examples of how adding waterfalls to something instantly makes it better are Matterhorn Bobsleds, Camp Discovery, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. (Would someone please fix the waterfall over the first lift hill of the Magic Kingdom’s BTMRR!) All of those attractions and so many more are vastly improved because they have waterfalls. DLP’s castle also has a waterfall and it just ads so much kinetic energy to it. I wish that all Disney theme park castles had waterfalls but I am also so glad that DLP’s is unique in that way.

Also, we went up to the second floor of the castle to see scenes from Sleeping Beauty and to take in the beautiful views of Fantasyland. The second floor is also where you can get a good up close look at the huge and beautiful stained glass windows that show characters from the film. They are real stained glass too! There is just so much detail in DLP’s castle that it is so hard to take it all in. It just has to be seen to be believed. Just Sleeping Beauty Castle alone shows how Disney broke the bank to pay for DLP. It just shows how much quality went into the park and how that level of detail has been rather absent from many of the Disney parks that were built after DLP.

On one of our days at DLP we closed out the night by watching the 30th anniversary fireworks show and it was very good. The show had various clips from Disney animated films, both classic and modern, with many scenes from films that take place in Europe. The clips were tied together cohesively with animated scenes of Tinkerbell, which was a very nice touch. It was so refreshing to see a modern Disney theme park fireworks and castle projection show that did not have any Marvel characters in it. I know that there are a lot of fans of Marvel characters and films out there but I highly doubt that they will stand the test of time for generations like the classic Disney animated characters and films.

The real star of the fireworks show for us though was the special DLP 30th anniversary drone show “Disney D-light” that preceded it. The drone show was simply breathtaking with hundreds of illuminated drones forming three dimensional shapes high above Sleeping Beauty Castle. The soundtrack for the show is titled “Un Monde Qui S’Illumine” and it is absolutely incredible. If you listen to the soundtrack at home then you might not think much about it. But you absolutely must listen to it at DLP during the “Disney D-light” show to get the full effect. Literally, the entire crowd at DLP starts to groove to the music and actually sing along to it. It is absolutely impossible to not join in on the fun! I was shocked because I have never ever seen a Disney theme park crowd get that pumped during a live show before. I thought that recorded crowd singing was coming through the speakers on Main Street where we were standing but no, it was all naturally coming from literally everyone all around us and up and down all of Main Street. Who knew that the French people love to party it up like that? I salute them because they made that drone show so much fun! That is what the Walt Disney World 50th anniversary fireworks show and music should have been like but, once again, at Disney theme parks the left hand has absolutely no clue what the right hand is doing. DLP did their 30th anniversary right!

So, that was what the DLP part of our trip was like. I think that it is pretty obvious to anyone that has read this that I fell in love with DLP. It more than lived up to the hype in my opinion and it completely blew the hype out of the water. Sure, there are things that could be fixed like the DLP website, ap, air conditioning, and their restaurant operational procedures, but in the big picture those are small things. The park itself is absolutely awesome and everyone in my family cannot wait to go back again. We most definitely will be going back too.

I should also mention that the DLP Cast Members were all fantastic too. I have read reports for many years about how the DLP Cast Members were the most unfriendly of all of the Disney theme parks but I certainly did not experience that at all. All of the Cast Members that we came across were very friendly and helpful. They did not top the Cast Members at TDL though because, let’s face it, the Cast Members in Japan are the best not only in terms of Disney parks but the best in the entire theme/amusement industry. The DLP Cast Members were very, very good though.

It was hard to leave DLP but we had a date with Switzerland. We rode the TGV train from Paris to Geneva and, once again, if I could just ride trains and never ever get on a plane again for the rest of my life I absolutely would in a heartbeat. The TGV was just as comfortable as the Shinkansen in Japan, another train that helped me despise all forms of air travel.

When we were planning the Switzerland part of our vacation, we had made a pact to avoid any and all automobiles, if possible. We were planning to use good old fashioned walking and riding on trains for our entire week and a half in Switzerland. I am happy to state that we were completely successful in our quest. Don’t get me wrong because I am a life-long gearhead and I love to drive my vehicles, but there is nothing more relaxing than avoiding all roads completely when on vacation.

We traveled by rail to the following cities in Switzerland: Geneva, Interlaken, Grindelwald, Spiez, Lucerne, Bern, and Zurich. As a watch collector it was fun to window shop in all of the nice watch shops in Geneva and particularly in Zurich where there was a Harry Winston store. I had previously only seen one of those in Shanghai. Though I saw many beautiful and expensive watches, I did not try any on nor buy any. I am more of a collector of Japanese watches and though I always enjoy looking at Swiss brands, I do not think that I would really want to add one to my collection.

While we were in Lucerne we spent the entire day at the Swiss Museum Of Transport. This was, hands down, one of the best museums that I have ever been to. Basically, if it moves it will be featured in this museum. It was totally impossible to see it all – planes, trains, automobiles, helicopters, rockets – you name it and it was there on display! We only spent a day in Lucerne so we had to be picky about what we looked at in the museum. One exhibit that I most definitely wanted to see tough was the huge building with trains in it. After reading about the history about various European trains in my LGB catalogs over the years, I was absolutely ecstatic to actually see the full scale locomotives in person. Finally, I saw a real Crocodile locomotive (Ge 6/6) of the Rhaetian Railway! It’s amazing how realistic the LGB model 2040 is when compared to the full scale locomotive. The museum actually had two Crocodiles on display.

There were several locomotives on display in the museum that were reproduced by LGB over the years and not just the Crocodile. They also had a Ge 2/4 locomotive on display with its side paneling removed so everyone could see its unusual electric drive mechanism. (LGB made a model of that locomotive that was number 2045.) They also had a steam locomotive that was on display over a service pit that was open to the public. The pit had stairs at both ends so anyone could walk underneath the locomotive and inspect its underside, all without getting covered with grease and soot like what would happen in a real steam locomotive pit. It was fun showing my son all of the parts underneath the locomotive and explaining to him what they did. He was amazed that there still was grease on some of the parts.

The museum also had several rack railway locomotives on display, including a few steam powered ones. Switzerland is the king of rack railways and I was surprised by how many different cog mechanisms have been used in the country over the years. The museum had a nice display that showed the various mechanisms and explained their plus and minus factors. You just do not see that in the US since we have so few rack railways in operation today and the ones still in operation are used as tourist railroads. In Switzerland they are rather common, even for non-tourist railroads, as we found out on our trip.

One of the steam powered cog locomotives on display at the museum had its boiler mounted transversely (sideways) on its frame to help keep the water as level as possible on steep inclines. In my lifetime of studying steam locomotives and learning as much as possible about them, I have never ever seen a transversely mounted boiler before. That was really cool!

It was hard to move on from the huge train building but we had to since there were so many other buildings to explore on the museum grounds. The other building that I was most interested in was the one with cars inside. They had a temporary display with Formula 1 cars from Red Bull Racing. They had about eight or ten cars on display and they were behind ropes but it was easy to get up really close to them. It’s always amazing to me how small F1 cars are because, for some reason, they always look so large to me when I watch a race on TV.

The highlight of the car building was undoubtedly the automated display rack that was located along one huge wall of the building. It was like a book shelf for cars with cars mounted on mobile platforms that were placed on a huge rack. TV monitors in a nearby seating area would start playing a video that explained details about a particular vehicle. As the video started, a robotic arm would move over to that specific vehicle on the rack and pull it down via its platform and move it to right in front of the seating area. When that particular video was done, then the arm would once again move the car via its platform back into its open space on the big rack. The rack was absolutely massive too! It had spaces for about thirty cars total, six spaces long by five spaces tall.

Over in the air transportation building that was full of planes and helicopters were some models of an Arianespace Ariane 5 heavy lift rocket. Those are the rockets that we use to launch our satellites into orbit. It seems like I can’t ever get a break from work!

The museum also had a building devoted to Swiss tourism and inside it was a huge section that was all about sky rides. It showed the various changes to sky rides over the years and they even had numerous real gondolas from sky rides, past and present, on display. I was amazed at the models of various sky rides, all of which were fully operational. They even had an operating model of a sky ride that was installed inside a big gondola from a real sky ride. It was absolutely fascinating overall because I have never ever seen a museum section devoted to sky rides. Note that Disneyland fans might be disappointed in the display because it was devoted specifically to sky rides in Switzerland. Thus, there was absolutely no mention of Disneyland’s Skyway and its place in sky ride history as the first ever Von Roll 101 installed in a theme/amusement park in 1956. I found the Swiss perspective of sky rides very fascinating because they seemed to view sky rides as true transportation devices while we here in America view them as just “rides.”

There was so much more to see at the Swiss Museum Of Transport but we only had one full day there and we could have easily spent two or three days there alone. We made sure to check out the one display that was not devoted to Swiss transportation and that was Swiss Chocolate Adventure. It was a trackless dark ride that explained the history of chocolate making in Switzerland. The highlight was the ending scene where everyone received a free Lindt Lindor chocolate truffle via a little chute that extended towards the ride vehicle. As if one truffle was not enough, after we exited the ride to go back into the museum’s main lobby, a cast member had a big bowl full of them and gave each of us several more!

We also ate at the Swiss Museum Of Transport and we all really liked the restaurant. All of the various museums that I have ever been to are devoted to numerous different subjects but the one single thing that they all had in common was bad food. Most museum restaurants are so bad that I usually leave the museum temporarily (if they allow re-entry) and eat lunch somewhere else. We were pleasantly surprised by the restaurant in the Swiss Museum Of Transport though. It was actually pretty good for a complete change! It was not world class dining but it was good and the prices were not bad at all. After walking through the massive museum all day we were all really hungry too.

Most of our time in Switzerland was in Interlaken, which we used as a base for our trip. Our hotel, called Hotel Goldey, was right on the bank of the Aare River and it had huge sliding glass doors that opened up to a big balcony that overlooked the river. The balcony and glass doors were also positioned perfectly to see a picture perfect view of Jungfrau, one of the main summits of the Burmese Alps. We loved eating breakfast every morning in Interlaken and looking at Jungfrau. It sure made Mount Umunhum back home seem so small!

An added bonus to staying at Hotel Goldey was that it was just a ten to fifteen minute walk to the train station in Interlaken. From our hotel room we could watch trains cross the Aare River via a bridge but we were just far enough away from the tracks so that they did not wake us up at night. My son and I had fun running over to the sliding glass doors every time we heard a train approaching so that we could identify it.

One of the fantastic train trips that we took was via local train from Interlaken to Grindelwald. The tracks were one meter gauge and climbed up high into the mountains past rivers and a few waterfalls. The train rolled through little tiny villages full of Swiss chalets like I had seen on TV and in movies. (Yes, they really still exist!) We also rolled through pastures full of cattle that had those uniquely shaped Swiss cow bells around their necks. We were so close to the cows that we could hear them mooing and hear the bells ringing. I saw lots of those cow bells of various sizes for sale in the various gift shops in Switzerland but I had no idea that ranchers actually still used them today. After seeing and hearing the real cow bells in action, my son could not resist buying a small one to take home.

As we were rolling to Grindelwald, I was shocked at the steep grade that our train was easily climbing up. My ears were popping several times along the way. I was stunned that a traditional traction locomotive could climb such steep grades so easily. At the station in Grindelwald, which was the end of the line, I noticed that there was a rack in the center of the track. That rack was not on the track back at the station in Interlaken. I learned that the electric locomotive at the front of our train was actually a cog locomotive and that there was a rack only on the steepest sections of track that the cog in the locomotive would engage with when pure traction between the wheels and rails was not enough to pull the train. The interesting thing was that, as a passenger, I could never feel anything when the cog was engaging with the rack. You would think that there would be a small jolt felt in the passenger cars or it would make a loud sound but I did not feel or hear anything during the ride and it was so smooth.

Grindelwald was a small town high in the Alps and it was so small, peaceful, and quaint. There was a sky ride there that went to the top of the mountain but we did not have time to ride it. There also was a rack railway that went up the mountain but we did not see any trains on it. We just strolled through the town and enjoyed the sights at a leisurely pace. It was then that I fell in love with Switzerland and its friendly people. We would definitely be coming back!

From Interlaken the next day we then went via rail to Spiez and then on to Bern. We did the usual touristy things in those two cities and basically took it slow and easy, in contrast to the DLP part of our vacation. Because of the change in pace, it seemed like DLP was so long ago when in reality it was just a week prior. When we got to Bern and were walking around Old Town and listening to the Zytglogge clock tower ring its bells that was when it hit me that our trip was winding down. It was really hard to come to grips with it but we would be heading to the airport in Zurich next and then headed back home.

Our next stop via rail was Zurich and we only spent one day there. Basically, we only went to Zurich because that was where the largest airport in Switzerland was located. All that we saw in the city was the shopping and dining area surrounding our hotel. It was a nice and relaxing place to close out our vacation at.

We did make sure to pick up some nice chocolates at one of the local stores in Zurich though. After looking at chocolate all throughout our time in Switzerland, we did not actually buy any because we were concerned about it melting and getting crushed. Since our trip was winding down, Zurich was the perfect place to finally buy some to take home with us.

The very next morning we headed to Zurich Airport and headed back home. We had a two hour layover in Vancouver, which was nice since I had never been there before. We landed right on time at San Francisco and then, for the first time in two and a half weeks, rode in a car back to our house. It was actually rather shocking to join back in the “rat race” that is 101, especially after all those wonderfully relaxing train rides that we took throughout our vacation.

Thus ends yet another fantastic vacation to a far away land. Everything went as planned on our trip and there were no big surprises along the way. The only little surprise that came up was way at the very beginning of our trip at the airport in San Francisco when I discovered that I had forgotten my credit cards at home. That was not a big deal though because my wife brought along two cards so we were covered. That was the only tiny bump in the road though. We planned for the nightmare scenarios that we had read about online from people that had their luggage stolen in Europe and our planning paid off. We always locked up all of our suitcases via cable locks to the luggage racks on all of the trains that we rode and we did not have any problems with anything being taken from us. Researching for this trip for a few years before actually leaving home really paid off for us.

If you are a fellow Disney theme park fan that is thinking about going to DLP, I say definitely do it if you can. I have read so many complaints about how expensive it is to go to WDW now and, though I agree that every Disney fan has to go to the Florida parks at least once in their lives, I also have to add that if you can put that WDW budget towards a DLP vacation instead, that honestly is a trade that I would seriously consider. The DLP Resort is looking better than ever after the massive refurbishment for the 30th anniversary so now is the time to go there. Also, and this applies to any of the non-US Disney theme parks and not just to DLP, after your time in the parks is over, you have the option to actually explore another country and experience its culture in person. Sure, Epcot’s World Showcase has pavilions that represent the foreign countries of the overseas Disney parks really well but nothing compares to the real countries. Also, especially with DLP, you can easily use Paris as a springboard to visit other countries in Europe on your trip very easily. If you go to WDW, you just get a springboard to visit more of Florida. While I always have an absolutely fantastic time in Florida, I would never consider its “culture” to be all that remarkable to be honest.

After this vacation I notice that my perspective on Disney theme parks has totally changed over the years. I now realize that not that long ago when the only park in the chain that I had been to was DL, my perspective on what was “good” and what was “bad” in a Disney park was very narrow. I have to admit that now it will take a lot more for a Disney park to really knock my socks off with a new attraction. My bar has been raised quite a bit now that my eyes have been opened up quite a bit wider after visiting all of the Disney theme parks in the chain.

So that’s how our summer vacation went. Sorry for this being so long but I really wanted to get my thoughts down via my keyboard before old age takes them away from me. We all had an absolutely fantastic time and we most definitely will go back to DLP and Switzerland again.

[Locoboy5150]

By the way, I just learned that Burnsland has a limit of 60000 characters for any post to the board. Believe it or not, I actually had to cut a little tiny bit out of the end of my original trip report to get it down to under the limit.

[Locoboy5150]

Oh one thing that I did not mention that members here might be interested in is that the Disneyland Paris RR closed early every day that we were in the park. I think that it closed around 6:00 PM, which was significantly earlier than when Disneyland Paris closed. So, if you want to ride it, make sure to not wait too long in the day or you just might miss your chance!