Disneyland Paris

During the Easter half term Tim, the kids and I drove to Folkestone and took the euro tunnel to Calais, France.

We stayed at the holiday inn express in a family room the night before our early morning departure. The family room consisted of two double beds next to each other which is ideal if you can handle having to have the lights out quite early so the little ones can get to sleep…which mine had trouble doing due to my preteen daughter refusing to go to sleep! They are money saving and ideal for the one night though. Unfortunately, they count over 12′s as ineligible as children!!! Adult fees apply. Oh and those that have more than three children may find it difficult booking such a room. At the holiday inn, the food was very basic. More like school dinners actually. The menu was limited so I chose pizza, which arrived burnt. Even the breakfast the next day was not great. All the croissants were rock hard on the bottom. I could not bite into any of them. Never mind, we were about to go to Paris! That was far more important…

…We arrived at the Euro Tunnel with time to grab some drinks etc and awaited to be called out. Upon arrival you get given a tag with a letter on it and over the tanoid when your letter is called you get in your car and queue up for the train. I had no idea what to expect when I got there because I had never been before so I was like an excited child at christmas just at the thought of driving my car onto a train, and a train it was! We drove in line along a train platform for cars and literally drove straight onto the train. Staff directed us and told us when to stop, some doors closed between each few cars and then a safety briefing was told. In French and English. The journey was about half an hour…we were in Calais. All we had to do after that was drive off the train and head onto the motorway, remembering to drive on the right of course!

We booked ourselves into the Davy Crockett Ranch (photos of accommodation seen in the video above) then drove the 6 minutes to Disneyland.

The car park was a good mile away from the actual entrance of the parks due to its sheer size…huge. It was so big that there were a line of flat escalator type conveyor belts to ease the pain of walking the whole distance. Like you get in airports. The car parks were not even a third full and Disneyland was busy enough in April. Let’s just say I will not be attending during the summer!

Both the park entrances are within sight of one another but don’t let that fool you. There is a lot of walking in either park before you actually get to any rides. We walked through plenty of shops and places to eat first. Which did not help when you had the kids wanting to buy gifts and have lunch the second we got there and having them moan already that their feet hurt. Before we had even started!

Don’t let this put you off Disneyland though. We had a fantastic time, apart from my partner being unwell for most of it. See the photos below and please watch at least some of the above video! It took me ages to cut the video down from an hour to 13 minutes.