tripodjw
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2007
Day 1
Pretrip report here http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1960054
Having been staying with DFiL for the weekend on the South Coast near Folkestone and with glorious weather all weekend, we got up about 6.15am and zipped off to the Chunnel check-in on the M20. We arrived exactly on time and stopped long enough in the car park to stick the headlight diverters on the car and joined the queue for the Chunnel train. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a delay as they were having a problem in one of the coach carriages (the fire doors wouldn’t close or something) so we left late which was a little annoying but ho hum.
Once through the tunnel, we finally got onto French soil and I began chanting my mantra “Drive on the right, Drive on the right”. I find foreign hire cars easy to adjust to but struggle a bit with my own car on the continent. It was a bit grey and we were bit worried about the weather as a few drops of rain started to fall.
We had a really quick trip down on the Autoroutes, I stuck cruise control on and Mr SatNav happily got us to the right place and warned us about all the speed cameras, not that I would break the speed limits (well maybe a couple of km/h too fast but nothing too bad, honest guv).
When we turned onto the A4 from the A104 I insisted that DH put Disney music on, so he picked the DLRP en musique album from the mp3 player, and as the Mickey signs ticked down the km, I started getting quite emotional. And then we spotted TOT and the castle from the Autoroute and a big fat tear rolled down my cheek. Thankfully it was only one tear, as driving while blubbing is pretty difficult.
We navigated the Disney backroads ok and pulled into the car park for the Hotal New York with the sun blazing and the multicoloured leaves on the autumnal trees almost blinking. Disney magic at its best, even Mickey can control the weather sometimes.
Checking in was dead easy and our room was ready even though it was only about 1.30pm. So we trogged back to the car, picked up all the bags and took them to the room. I started really panicking now that my surprise of Champagne and Mickey balloons for DH wouldn’t be there (we were checking in so early) – but we opened the door and there they were. Champagne, balloons and even some petit fours.
BUT best of all, we’d been upgraded to a lake view room right bang in the centre of the hotel. Couldn’t have been better.
Dirty windows though
We stopped and had the goodies, and DH was all sweet and silly because he was so surprised by my arranging the treats for him.
Then we packed up the camera bag, and headed off. We decided to start in the studios so we could go and see Stitch as this was new since our last visit. We had TOT burger meals in Studio 1 including my beloved Mickey Brioche, then headed to see Stitch. We had to wait a little bit longer so watched the comedy performers in Production Courtyard. The baby scene was funny and we felt sorry for the guy who got picked to dress up as a baby. The director was really getting into the swing of things too.
IMHO, WDS has been missing these kinds of performers so its good to see more of them on the schedule.
Anyway, Stitch in English was finally ready to start. This was ace, I really like these types of attractions (same goes for Turtle Talk with Crush and Monsters Inc laugh floor in the US). I think they’re dead clever, and even though Stitch didn’t pick on us we wet ourselves laughing when Stitch remembered he’d met “George” in Space Prison and when he selected a new girlfriend.
I do miss being able to see the real behind the scenes workings of the Disney Channel and I wish they had been able to keep some of that somewhere in the building.
We wandered over to Aerosmith, and with a 5 min queue we thought why not. Personally, I like the Paris version better than the WDW version. The idea of the coaster being based on Aerosmith songs is much better than the US story which is themed as a “mad limousine ride across LA”.
After rocking the world, we poked around the outside of the Motor show and spotted a nice number plate decoration:
And after wandering around TOT area we then headed to Crush to see what the queue was like, 30 mins, pretty good so we decided to go on. It was all going swimmingly until there was a breakdown, which added another 15-20 mins on to the queue time, but thankfully I had my new fisheye camera lens to play with…
As the sun was pretty much shining and the weather forecast for the following days wasn’t great we headed over the Disneyland Park so I could take some pictures while the sun was still out.
We wandered up Main Street and took the obligatory pictures of the castle, Main street buildings and of course at this time of year the Halloween Pumpkin-men. There were only a few Halloween decorations out so far (more were to come day by day as the week progressed).
We visited my friend the Dragon in his cave and set up the gorillapod (minitripod) on one of the rocks so I could take some pics using the fisheye lens.
Then we had a walk to Frontierland so I could go on my favourite attraction, Phantom Manor. I love all the variants of this, the Manor here in Paris, both American versions and I love the Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay in California (I’m even planning next yrs holiday to the US for Autumn so I can make sure I see it again). The sun was starting to set and the light was lovely, so we hung out taking pics of Phantom Manor, Big Thunder and Boot Hill (which was open for a change).
I especially like this Big Thunder silhouette, if you look carefully you can see the engine and some people in the carriages further back.
It was getting towards park closing by then and we thought we’d go browse the shops and head to the hotel for a rest and to unpack. We dashed through some pretty big crowds watching the beginning of Candleabration, and decided not to stop as we’d see it later in the week (this later turned out to be the wrong choice!).
For dinner we were going to Buffalo Bills (late showing) so we dashed off to the Village and picked up our hats. I’ve seen this show at least 4 times now and I’ve only ever not been Yellow once (I was green that one time). We headed into the bar and had a drink. We lazed around the bar, looked in the shop and watched the band before Yellow Texas Lonestar was called.
The show was excellent as always, a number of the performers were the same as I’d seen a few times before. I always find this reassuring when I see the same CM’s on repeat visits.
I took quite a lot of pics and I’m pleased there are some reasonable ones. It really helps having finally got a DSLR and some decent lenses.
(meant to blurry honest!)
Unfortunately Blue team won, but I have been chosen to ride in the carriage on a previous visit so I wasn’t too disappointed. The food has also improved since my last visit. I think we got more food and the veg (corn and potatoes) were much tastier this time (not that they were bad before).
When the show finished we headed out into the night and wandered round the village and lake taking pictures. This visit I brought my tripod so was able to set up to take some really nice long exposures.
If you look closely in the next one you can see a Mickey balloon in a window (bottom-ish left). That was our room.
After we’d wandered round in the dark for a while we decided it was bedtime with EMH the next day so went back to the room.
When we got back there was a message shoved under the door from reception so I had to call down to find out what it was, only the recipt for the champagne/chocs so I said I’d get it in the morning and we finally crawled into bed at about midnight.
More pics from day 1 on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/tripodjw/sets/72157607909327080/detail/
Day 2 now here http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1979514
Day 3 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1982592
Day 4 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?p=28194601
Day 5 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1985274
Pretrip report here http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1960054
Having been staying with DFiL for the weekend on the South Coast near Folkestone and with glorious weather all weekend, we got up about 6.15am and zipped off to the Chunnel check-in on the M20. We arrived exactly on time and stopped long enough in the car park to stick the headlight diverters on the car and joined the queue for the Chunnel train. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a delay as they were having a problem in one of the coach carriages (the fire doors wouldn’t close or something) so we left late which was a little annoying but ho hum.
Once through the tunnel, we finally got onto French soil and I began chanting my mantra “Drive on the right, Drive on the right”. I find foreign hire cars easy to adjust to but struggle a bit with my own car on the continent. It was a bit grey and we were bit worried about the weather as a few drops of rain started to fall.
We had a really quick trip down on the Autoroutes, I stuck cruise control on and Mr SatNav happily got us to the right place and warned us about all the speed cameras, not that I would break the speed limits (well maybe a couple of km/h too fast but nothing too bad, honest guv).
When we turned onto the A4 from the A104 I insisted that DH put Disney music on, so he picked the DLRP en musique album from the mp3 player, and as the Mickey signs ticked down the km, I started getting quite emotional. And then we spotted TOT and the castle from the Autoroute and a big fat tear rolled down my cheek. Thankfully it was only one tear, as driving while blubbing is pretty difficult.
We navigated the Disney backroads ok and pulled into the car park for the Hotal New York with the sun blazing and the multicoloured leaves on the autumnal trees almost blinking. Disney magic at its best, even Mickey can control the weather sometimes.
Checking in was dead easy and our room was ready even though it was only about 1.30pm. So we trogged back to the car, picked up all the bags and took them to the room. I started really panicking now that my surprise of Champagne and Mickey balloons for DH wouldn’t be there (we were checking in so early) – but we opened the door and there they were. Champagne, balloons and even some petit fours.
BUT best of all, we’d been upgraded to a lake view room right bang in the centre of the hotel. Couldn’t have been better.
Dirty windows though
We stopped and had the goodies, and DH was all sweet and silly because he was so surprised by my arranging the treats for him.
Then we packed up the camera bag, and headed off. We decided to start in the studios so we could go and see Stitch as this was new since our last visit. We had TOT burger meals in Studio 1 including my beloved Mickey Brioche, then headed to see Stitch. We had to wait a little bit longer so watched the comedy performers in Production Courtyard. The baby scene was funny and we felt sorry for the guy who got picked to dress up as a baby. The director was really getting into the swing of things too.
IMHO, WDS has been missing these kinds of performers so its good to see more of them on the schedule.
Anyway, Stitch in English was finally ready to start. This was ace, I really like these types of attractions (same goes for Turtle Talk with Crush and Monsters Inc laugh floor in the US). I think they’re dead clever, and even though Stitch didn’t pick on us we wet ourselves laughing when Stitch remembered he’d met “George” in Space Prison and when he selected a new girlfriend.
I do miss being able to see the real behind the scenes workings of the Disney Channel and I wish they had been able to keep some of that somewhere in the building.
We wandered over to Aerosmith, and with a 5 min queue we thought why not. Personally, I like the Paris version better than the WDW version. The idea of the coaster being based on Aerosmith songs is much better than the US story which is themed as a “mad limousine ride across LA”.
After rocking the world, we poked around the outside of the Motor show and spotted a nice number plate decoration:
And after wandering around TOT area we then headed to Crush to see what the queue was like, 30 mins, pretty good so we decided to go on. It was all going swimmingly until there was a breakdown, which added another 15-20 mins on to the queue time, but thankfully I had my new fisheye camera lens to play with…
As the sun was pretty much shining and the weather forecast for the following days wasn’t great we headed over the Disneyland Park so I could take some pictures while the sun was still out.
We wandered up Main Street and took the obligatory pictures of the castle, Main street buildings and of course at this time of year the Halloween Pumpkin-men. There were only a few Halloween decorations out so far (more were to come day by day as the week progressed).
We visited my friend the Dragon in his cave and set up the gorillapod (minitripod) on one of the rocks so I could take some pics using the fisheye lens.
Then we had a walk to Frontierland so I could go on my favourite attraction, Phantom Manor. I love all the variants of this, the Manor here in Paris, both American versions and I love the Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay in California (I’m even planning next yrs holiday to the US for Autumn so I can make sure I see it again). The sun was starting to set and the light was lovely, so we hung out taking pics of Phantom Manor, Big Thunder and Boot Hill (which was open for a change).
I especially like this Big Thunder silhouette, if you look carefully you can see the engine and some people in the carriages further back.
It was getting towards park closing by then and we thought we’d go browse the shops and head to the hotel for a rest and to unpack. We dashed through some pretty big crowds watching the beginning of Candleabration, and decided not to stop as we’d see it later in the week (this later turned out to be the wrong choice!).
For dinner we were going to Buffalo Bills (late showing) so we dashed off to the Village and picked up our hats. I’ve seen this show at least 4 times now and I’ve only ever not been Yellow once (I was green that one time). We headed into the bar and had a drink. We lazed around the bar, looked in the shop and watched the band before Yellow Texas Lonestar was called.
The show was excellent as always, a number of the performers were the same as I’d seen a few times before. I always find this reassuring when I see the same CM’s on repeat visits.
I took quite a lot of pics and I’m pleased there are some reasonable ones. It really helps having finally got a DSLR and some decent lenses.
(meant to blurry honest!)
Unfortunately Blue team won, but I have been chosen to ride in the carriage on a previous visit so I wasn’t too disappointed. The food has also improved since my last visit. I think we got more food and the veg (corn and potatoes) were much tastier this time (not that they were bad before).
When the show finished we headed out into the night and wandered round the village and lake taking pictures. This visit I brought my tripod so was able to set up to take some really nice long exposures.
If you look closely in the next one you can see a Mickey balloon in a window (bottom-ish left). That was our room.
After we’d wandered round in the dark for a while we decided it was bedtime with EMH the next day so went back to the room.
When we got back there was a message shoved under the door from reception so I had to call down to find out what it was, only the recipt for the champagne/chocs so I said I’d get it in the morning and we finally crawled into bed at about midnight.
More pics from day 1 on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/tripodjw/sets/72157607909327080/detail/
Day 2 now here http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1979514
Day 3 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1982592
Day 4 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?p=28194601
Day 5 - http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=1985274
