Europe Day 15 & 16 Disney Paris Resort

Yesterday and today the parks opened at 9:30 so we slept in a bit and left the hotel around 9. The Paris resort consists of two parks, a retail area with some restaurants and a cinema, and a half dozen hotels. Our tickets allowed us to hop between parks so that’s what we did. Of course we spent most of our time in the Disneyland Park, since it has more attractions and more we wanted to experience. 

 

The Disneyland park is truly beautiful with lots of great details. It’s also well laid out. Frontierland and Adventureland are swapped from where they are in the American castle parks, and instead of Tomorrowland it has a Discoveryland, which has a steam punk vibe. Several of the classic rides are really well done here but with slight differences. Their version of the Haunted Mansion, Phantom Manor, is cool because it’s set in Frontierland. 

The Walt Disney Studios Park is still fairly light on attractions. They are currently working on a Frozen expansion and supposedly are planning more. The Toy Story area at the Studio park is just flat rides, so we just walked through it. The old “backstage” tram tour is now a Cars Route 66 ride. It’s kind of lame. Two of the most popular rides at the Studios are Ratatouille and the Crush Coaster, and we didn’t care about doing those. Crush Coaster is a spinning mouse we had done in 2014, and it was a one and done for us.

Just recently they revamped their black lot area into an Avengers Campus. The Spider-Man ride was similar to Midway Mania and the Avengers coaster was a bit dark and rough. We didn’t eat at any table service restaurants in the parks; there weren’t many reservations available and the menus didn’t appeal to us. It was fairly cool both yesterday and today, with highs in the mid 60’s. Crowds weren’t too bad, most waits were in the 30 to 60 minute range and some were walk on. There was a fair amount of construction walls up and several attractions were closed. I would have liked to watched the fireworks show, but it wasn’t until 11 o’clock.

At Disney and in Europe generally, people aren’t allowed to smoke inside anymore but make up for it by smoking near building entrances and at outside tables. We saw several nice beer gardens and sidewalk bistros that would have been nice to stop at but they all had smokers at them. At Disney most smokers stuck to the designated areas, but they were often near restrooms so we had to pass through a gauntlet to use them. This afternoon we walked through Disney Village and checked out some of the hotels. They were nice but not as grand as those in Orlando or Anaheim. I did enjoy the Art of Marvel at the New York Hotel. We had dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe, then headed back to our hotel.