11th December
So continuing the theme of reminiscing about time at Disney parks at Christmas, let me tell you about the couple of visits to Disneyland Paris during the holiday season.
Our first visit at Christmas was in early December 2000, we visited over a weekend spending 3 nights at Hotel Cheyenne. We even managed a day visiting Paris with the highlights of the day being The Eiffel Tower and Picasso Museum. The weather was cold, although the snow falling in the Disney Village was man-made! There was a lovely Christmas market laid out through the Disney Village and I remember that everywhere seemed to smell of warm mulled wine, it was all very Christmassy, there was even an ice-rink outside the Hotel New York.
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| Main Street, USA - Disneyland Park, Paris - 2000 |
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| Ice Rink, Hotel New York - 2000 |
Our second visit was the weekend just before Christmas in 2002. The main difference between these two visits was the crowds. Now both visits were busy, as you would expect over weekends, but the second visit just before Christmas was unbelievably so. On our last day I remember by 11.00am all the Fastpasses had been issued for Peter Pan's Flight and the standby queue was at nearly 3 hours!!
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| Main Street, USA - Disneyland Park, Paris - 2002 |
There were two great things about this visit, first we happened to visit at the exact same time as some very good friends of ours, totally unplanned but great fun to share the experience with them! And the second was that it coincided with our son's birthday; when we arrived at our hotel there was even a present waiting for him and a special badge for him to wear.
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| Pull key-chain Donald, still working 10 years later! |
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| Birthday Badge |
We had also arranged to have a character meal, a buffet tea with a special birthday cake. Our daughter who was just over one at the time didn't quite know what to make of all the characters, but I think the abundance of cakes and sweets made up for that :)
