After carefully planning our route to get to Euro Disney (not that anywhere called it that), we got up early and began our journey. Aside from a brief rain scare the trip was uneventful, and we made it to the park about 10:30, half an hour after it opened. Our hope that a weekday would be relatively quiet was quickly quashed, and the queues had begun. The first was to get our ticket into the park, of which there were a few options.
The park is actually split into two. There is 'Disneyland Park' and also 'Walt Disney Studios' park. We chose a ticket that only let us into one (as we were only spending a day there, we determined that we'd only have time for the one) and chose, of course, the Disneyland park. I can only assume that the Walt Disney Studios is basically like Warner Brothers Movieworld, but am not exactly sure. At any rate, we made our way into the park, along with several thousands of other peope, and started to look around.
Disneyland in Paris is broken up into Frontierland (like the old west), Adventureland (Indiana Jonesey), Fantasyland (faries and pretty stuff), and Discoveryland (Buzz Lightyear and sci fi stuff). Each of these 'lands' had usually one premium roller coaster or form of ride. We went to Adventureland first and queued for a while to try the Indiana Jones ride. I say 'we', but actually only Ian and myself went on this one, Lisa was still paralysed with fear of rollercoasters. It was pretty good, if quite short, but got us in the mood for the rest of the day. As I mentioned, the queues were considerable. However, there was a thing called a "Fast Pass". For several of the more popular rides, you put your ticket into a machine which gives you another ticket to come back to this ride at a certain time (in a half hour window). At that time, you use this Fast Pass ticket to bypass the regular line, which seemed to cut the queue time in about half. Otherwise, each ride had an expected wait, which turned out to be quite accurate. The trick is you can only hold one Fast Pass ticket at a time, which prevents you from running around to all the rides collecting them. However, if you do end up waiting for a ride, they've been quite clever in making the lines quite entertaining in and of themselves. Each one is decorated in the theme of the ride, so in the case of Indiana Jones, we were walking through jungly areas, with jeeps and tents and so forth. It was very well done. In the case of Space Tours, the whole place was done up like a Star Wars base, with droids yapping on (mostly in French) complete with an animatronic C3PO and R2D2 arguing with each other, again in French. At least R2D2's bleeps and bloops seem to transcend language.
We got our Fast Pass ticket to the Space Mountain ride, which from my previous trip to Disney in LA, I expected to be the biggest and baddest. While waiting for our time window, we grabbed some lunch, and tried to convince Lisa to join us (we'd gotten her a ticket also). This failed, so we left Lisa to watch the Lion King musical production in the food area and headed off. The line again was fairly entertaining with a video of a lady explaining our mission and the safety procedures. The coupled with the screaming of the patrons already enjoying the trip made for an interesting atmostphere. The ride itself is indoors, and pitch black. There are several lit up asteroids that you go hurtling past, and various other lighting effects. It is by far the fastest and most enjoyable ride on the park. Later on in the day we would convince Lisa to join us, and she, while pale as a ghost, enjoyed it just as much as we did. In fact, on this second trip, I had the opportunity of being in the front of the thing which was even more intense.
Other rides we went on included Star Tours, as mentioned before, which includes the trip in a star speeder (more like a transport ship) which is actually one of those simulators that you sit in and it moves up and down, etc, whilst you watch a video screen which flies around in synch with the motion. The whole thing is very realistic, and I'd be extremely interested to see the whole thing from the outside, to see how they actually emulate the g-forces and feeling of movement in such a static context. The Buzz Lightyear ride involved sitting in a little pod which ran along a fixed track. You could spin the thing left and right with a joystick, and the aim was to shoot various objects within the environment with a laser gun to rack up points. The other significant ride was the Big Mountain Thunder somethingorother, which we didn't have a ticket for. This resulted in a line wait of just over an hour, complete with annoying kids running into the back of me. I soon learned that if I shifted my body left and right, the bag on my back would lightly bump their little heads, but they didn't really manage to learn the lesson of keeping a bit of distance. Oh well, the ride itself was pretty cool, but we certainly weren't going to wait another hour for the experience a second time.
Other interesting occurences included a couple of parades, one of which was very detailed. Several floats went past with all different characters from various Disney themes. We only caught the very start of another parade, as the characters were beginning their journey around the park, and this was the only chance I got to be anywhere near Donald. He didn't seem real keen on shaking my hand, but I got a couple photo's none the less. It's ok Donald, I can't stay mad at you!
The other rides included the famous "Its A Small World" with lots of little puppets dressed and acting in different nationalities, the Pirates of the Carribean ride, the Snow White and 7 Dwarves ride and a couple other small ones which elude me. These were all pretty tame, although the Pirates one was pretty cool, lots of animatronic pirates drinking and chasing wenches about the place.
To Willy and Mel, no, I didn't see or hear anything about the girl who died on the roller coaster. Also, I didn't see any roller coaster with that name either, so I think she was at the Studios park, but all the rides I went on at the Disney park seemed perfectly safe!
All in all it was a busy, crowded, but ultimately enjoyable day. Certainly didn't need more than a day there, but it would be interesting to see what the Studios park was all about.
The next morning we got up at 5:30 to get on the train down to Carcassonne, which was a 4 and a bit hour journey from Paris. Using my laundry bag as a neck pillow allowed a small amount of sleep on the trip, and upon arrival we found a shuttle to take us up to the medieval city, where our hostel is situated.
The medieval city is basically a very old fort that has been around for over a thousand years. Rebuilt a few times, the place is massive, and I could easily understand how impenetrable it must have been for armies of the time. There's plenty of the castle to see, even if the whole thing is a bit touristy. We had a local specialty, Cassoulet which was basically a bean stew with pork sausage and a bit of duck. It wasn't bad, but I'm not that keen on beans (the baked bean style). There's not a lot to say about the place, but we spent this morning doing an audio walking tour of the castle part of the fortress (they give you a little handheld MP3 player thing, and you press a button related to which part of the castle you're in and listen to the info) which was very interesting. The place has a rich history of being captured and recaptured several times over the centuries, and each time they do something different to the place, including buliding another wall around the place and more turret defenses, etc. At night they light the whole place up with many well positioned floodlights, and I look forward to going down into the new town tonight and getting some good photos of the lit fortress.
Unfortunately the computers in France have been fairly well locked down, and I haven't had a chance to upload any new photos yet, except for a couple of Trier, there's more of Trier to come though.
All in all, things are well, and it's been fun travelling with Ian and Lisa, both to have someone talk to, and also to have someone to laugh at my crap jokes and puns. I think Ian has enjoyed the reciprocal, however I don't think Lisa is quite as appreciative of our comedic genius. I've also had "It's a small world after all" stuck in my head for the past two days, and it shows no signs of relenting yet...
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