Disneyland Paris Tips

- Take your own teabags, coffee sachets or squeezy squash tubes. Water, cold or hot, is free in all of the cafes and restaurants in the parks.
- Try to go in the week instead of a weekend if you can. Particularly out of the school holidays, the park is twice as busy at the weekends, and queue times can top 90 minutes.
- Pack a lot of layers. The weather is incredibly indecisive, and can change several times a day.
- Avoid taking a bag if you want to skip queues into the park. The entrances are manned with scanners, but if you are bag-less you can skip the queues.
- If you ask, all the restaurants have gluten free bread, and some have gluten free cakes and biscuits (and they're always free).
- If there's a particular ride you want a fast pass for, get that first thing. The fast passes are free but allocated on a first come first serve basis, with a limited number per day. Some of the popular rides (Peter Pan's Flight and Thunder Mountain) can be out of Fast Passes by lunchtime.
- Food is expensive and not healthy either, but you can take food in. If you have any specific dietary requirements or you're trying to eat healthily it's worth taking stuff with you, since 99% of the restaurants only serve burgers and chicken nuggets.
- Book a table for your first night there, or you'll struggle to get a table anywhere. If you're staying over a Saturday night, book for that too, it's the busiest night in the park.
- Download Disney App for wait times, meet and greets, and closure information.
- Pick up a map at the entrance, even if you don't think you'll need it, it's hard to get them elsewhere in the park.
- Magic hours are great for meet and greats but not for rides! Only Discoveryland and Fantasyland are open and not all the rides are open within those areas.

- Comfy shoes are a must!

Walt Disney Studios

Today I thought I'd chat to you about the general park experience at Walt Disney Studios, the Park adjacent to Disneyland which is more Disney themed. 

You'll notice in this post that I have nowhere near as many photos of this park, and that can be fully attributed to two things. One, there's just not as much to photograph here. Sad but true, this park isn't quite up there with Disneyland in picture-perfectness. Secondly, the park is fairly poorly designed, instead of spreading out the rides, attractions, and photo-ops, they're mostly crammed together, leaving the rest of the park fairly empty, with just the live shows and a few of the 'scarier' rides, that don't have giant queues or anything visual around it. What this means is that the areas that had all the good design features that I wanted to photograph, were so busy I couldn't get any decent photos, which was a shame. There is a bit of footage in the vlog though!

This dodgy layout also meant that this was a less enjoyable park to be in, partly because the good areas were so rammed with people it was hard to move without going into the back of someone who stopped for no reason, or getting hit in the head with a selfie stick.

 There's not as much ride-wise in this park to appeal to small kids, the majority of the rides are definitely a bit scarier, and more appropriate for the older, thrill seekers of the group. There are a ton of live shows though that are definitely more geared up for the little ones. We found our group was split down the middle, my dad, my boyfriend, my sister and her boyfriend all wanted to be in this park, riding the terrifying coasters, whilst my mum and I ended up waiting around for them a lot, since we aren't really scary ride people! 

All this being said, the park has some seriously awesome rides in it. The Ratatouille ride is fantastic, a 3d ride experience which genuinely makes you feel like a mouse being chased around a kitchen. Unfortunately for us, the fast pass machines for this ride were out of action, and the wait time never dropped below an hour. we decided that instead of missing out completely, we'd join the single riders queue, which meant we were all on the ride in 5 minutes. The carts actually go round in threes, so chances are you'll still go around with your group, just in separate carts. My parents actually ended up in the same one by a stroke of luck, so providing you aren't with small kids this is a great option.

That doesn't work for all the rides though, we all split up one afternoon to do our own thing, and my sister and her boyfriend joined the single rider queue for Crush's Coaster (seriously awesome ride, but quite vicious and scary, not for the little ones!), and ended up queuing for 45 minutes, only 10 minutes less than if they'd joined the normal queue, so it's worth taking the estimated weight times with a pinch of salt. 

The big thing that happened in this park, is I somehow got strong armed into going on my first ever rollercoaster with a loop in. I'm not really sure how it happened but I suddenly found myself strapped into a car on the Rock'n'Rollercoaster, which boasts a starting 'launch' from 0-60mph in 3 seconds, a full loop, and a barrel roll or two chucked in for good measure. I should mention that the whole thing happens in the dark, with the sounds of Aerosmith blaring through the speakers. In all honesty, the wait and getting on the ride was worse than the ride itself, but I still rode the entire ride with my eyes squeezed firmly shut, and my hand cutting off the circulation in my boyfriends. My dad actually bought the photo because he thought it was so hilarious. Parents hey. I've included the photo for your amusement. As you can see, there is pure joy in my dad, sister and boyfriends faces, and pure horror in mine.

Attractive, huh?

Bad layout choices aside, this park is great, but you couldn't spend more than a day here! There's much less going on here than in the Disneyland park! 

Don't miss: Crush's Coaster, Ratatouille, Rock'n'Rollercoaster

Disneyland Paris Hotel New York

 I'm one of these people who likes to research the crap out of every aspect of my holidays before they happen, I like to know all about the hotel, the area, the food, the activities. It's partly an anxiety thing, I'm an anxious traveller, and the more I know about where I'm going, the better I feel, but it's also a fear of missing out thing! I don't want to miss something important!

Anyway, getting to the point, when I was searching for the Disneyland Hotel New York where we were staying, I realised there was very little information about it, a small amount of info one the Disney website and a few less than helpful trip advisor reviews. So, I figured I'd add to the pool in case anyone else out there was looking for information, or if you're nosy like me, you can have a peak inside the hotel!

So the Disneyland Hotel New York is billed as a four star hotel with a 'contemporary art deco' feel. As you can imagine, it's all themed around stereotypical New York imagery, from the bright yellow cabs to the walls painted like subway stations.

Let's start with the good stuff! The rooms were spacious, clean and quiet, and the hotel itself is situated right at the edge of Disney Village, making it the closest hotel to the park (bar the hotel actually in the park!). We were grateful for how close it was after spending all day on our feet! The staff were all super friendly and helpful, particularly at the concierge! The wifi is great too, we were able to stream Netflix easily from our rooms, which is unusual for a hotel!

The hotel has two restaurants, an a la carte and a buffet-style diner, as well as a bar which serves snacks. Our room was bed and breakfast, and we could have breakfast in any of the restaurants. They had a good choice of pastries, cereals and continental meats and cheeses, but they could have done with more fresh fruits and the hot food was a little weird. They had delicious pancakes and good ol' american streaky bacon, but the scrambled eggs were powdered (big no no) and the sausages were veal, which was a bit weird. 

The hotel has a big old swimming pool, with a big jacuzzi at the back, and 3 people steam rooms and saunas in the changing rooms. The pool was a little chilly, but it was nice to get a few lengths in after a long day at the park!

 Whilst there was nothing specifically wrong with the hotel, it definitely didn't quite match up to some of the other 4* establishments I've stayed in. Decor is definitely dated, whilst to a certain extent it fits the theme, some areas definitely needed updating, such as the bathrooms, and in some places the wallpaper was looking pretty tired. It was lacking basic amenities that you would expect with a five star rating, like tea and coffee making facilities in the room, and somewhere to sit in the lobby.  None of this was deal breaking, but the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a four star!

With this hotel, you're definitely paying for the location over anything else! Whilst we enjoyed our stay there, if we were going back for more than a few days, I'd definitely consider staying somewhere self catering, it got very boring eating out in all the not very healthy restaurants!

Disneyland: The Park

Here it is, the first in a series of posts all about my Disneyland Paris experience! I've thought long and hard about the best way to do this, I know a lot of you are just interested in a general show and tell, but a lot of you are also in the details too. So, I've decided to split it into a few post, The Disneyland Park experience, The Walt Disney Studios Experience, The Disneyland Hotel New York Review, Eating at Disneyland and then a general tips/best bits post. Hopefully, this will cover everything you guys want to see! If there's anything I've missed that you'd like to know, just let me know!

 So lets talk about the park in general! We visited from Thursday through Monday, so we got to experience the park quieter, and busier on the weekend. I would definitely try to avoid a weekend trip, because the queue times were dramatically longer for everything, and it was definitely a more stressful experience! I've visited the park before, but we're talking about 14 years ago, and I've visited the California park more recently. I've never been to the Florida park so I can't compare it to that! It's definitely smaller than it's California counterpart, and there are fewer 'big thrills' rides!

The park was decorated for Spring and looked beautiful, especially when the sun made an appearance! I loved all the flowers round the park too, it all felt really beautiful, and like Spring was on it's way (despite the weather)!

It's worth pointing out at this point that it was FREEZING. With the exception of the last day, it was bitterly cold. Like, coats, scarves, gloves and hats cold. Like, on one day, my mum wore two pairs of trousers cold. Obviously this is kind of to be expected considering the time of year and destination, but when you're spending so much time outside it was really quite uncomfortable!

The park itself is quite compact, everything's quite close together, but you do end up walking miles whilst your there! My legs ached a lot! According to my phone, I was walking around 12k a day, which when you spend most of your time sat at your desk is a LOT. You'll definitely be wanting comfy shoes, I wore my Vans on the first day, and regretted it, then just stuck to my Nike 6.0s for the rest of the trip! 

 One of the disappointing things was that a lot of the park was closed whilst we were there. Obviously we knew this was going to be the case before hand, but on the website it just listed a couple of closed rides, when in actuality, a lot of the shops and restaurants were closed too. This was kind of a bummer in two ways, the first that obviously, things were shut. Both Space Mountain and Phantom Manor were closed, which are two of the bigger rides, and two of my favourites, so that was a shame. The second was that because big chunks of the park were shut, it made the rest of the park much busier, and bumped up the weight times for the other rides, so it's definitely worth checking what's closed prior to visiting. 

Ride times totally varied the entire time we were there. Thunder Mountain (my favourite!) varied from around 20 minutes, right up to 90, which is just madness, whilst the smaller rides generally were between 5 and 20 minutes. Not all the rides have fastpasses, so it's worth checking which rides do, and you can only have one fastpass at a time, so if you have one, you have to wait until you've used that to get another. Kind of annoying but I guess it's the most fair way to do it! The fastpasses are free, but done on a first come first served basis, a lot of the rides (namely Thunder Mountain and Peter Pans Flight) were out of fastpasses by midday, so definitely get in there early!

 DON'T MISS: Thunder Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, Alice's Curious Labyrinth, Buzz Lightyear's Laser Blast, Mad Hatter's Tea Cups.

 The park definitely doesn't have as much character interaction as it's California counterparts, there were several organised character meet and greets around the park, but none of the characters just strolling down the street stuff! I'm not sure if this was just because it was out of season! There also wasn't as much music playing around the park, which my mum and I both commented on as a bit of a shame!

The park is undeniably stunning. The attention to detail is positively stunning, everything from the gas lights in the arcade on Main Street, to the 'barbers shop' inside one of the stores, to the rooftiles in Fantasyland! It's easy to spend the day just wondering around soaking up the details. Some of the stuff was a little run down, but there was a lot of maintenance going on whilst we were there. Discoveryland was a bit of a disappointment, most of it was shut and it all looked a little tired, but Fantasyland and Frontierland made up for it!

I somehow missed most of the parades, but I caught the Disney Dreams Lights and Fireworks display twice, and it was honestly breathtaking! Such a magical experience. 

Despite the cold and the closures, we had the most amazing time! I don't think you'd need more than two or three days in this park, unless it was really busy, I think we were there for the perfect amount of time to experience everything! 

I honestly can't thank my parents enough for the best birthday experience ever!