Summer 2026 Graduation Celebration: Edinburgh, London, Disneyland Paris, Paris - Day 15 Travel Home and Final Thoughts

As we all know, I’m a big planner and researcher and before leaving, I carefully researched what time the RER B trains would start running to get to the airport. They began leaving at 5:30 so I figured if we left our place between 5:00-5:10 to take the M1 to the closest station that transfers to the RER B, we’d be good. What I didn’t count on was the fact that the metro itself doesn’t start running until 5:30. That would mean we wouldn’t get to the airport until 6:30 at the earliest which, with an 8:00 AM international flight wasn’t early enough. When did we learn this? When we were already at the M1 station with all our baggage. I ordered us an Uber and would try to get a refund for our transit tickets when we got home (I still haven’t heard back from the French public transit customer service). 

Our travel back was smoother than our travel out. We did have some delay into and out of Heathrow because Heathrow, but we had enough buffer. Always give yourself at least two hours between flights at Heathrow—at least! 

I have some final thoughts about the trip as a whole. First, this was our first time in a long time not taking a cruise for our big summer vacation. There were definitely some pros and cons. The main pro is that it was nice having multiple days to really get to know and explore Edinburgh and Paris. (London being mostly a stopover and a place we’ve all been to several times now, I’m not really counting it.) And I would definitely return to all of these cities as I feel like they all still have more to offer. The next pro was that this was a cheaper vacation than some other recent European vacations with cruises. Cruises, especially with Disney, are just more expensive. So that’s a pro. 

One of the cons is that we didn't have built-in relaxation days, days where we were just at sea and relaxing, maybe getting things like laundry done. I had to be really conscious about building in down time and time for us to get laundry done. Another con was finding meals, which started to feel really tedious. Even though we tried to do a lot of that research prior to the trip, it was challenging once we were actually out and about because sometimes we didn’t feel like whatever we had originally planned, or something ended up being closed or out of business or our schedule was slightly different than I had anticipated and we found ourselves in a different area of town than originally we had thought we would be. Another con was all the unpacking, repacking, and moving ourselves from city to city. Not only did this all take a lot of time and effort, the train tickets were actually more expensive than I would have thought. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a lot less effort than flying (and still probably slightly cheaper), but I wasn’t quite prepared to pay $400 for all three of us one way on the Eurostar from London to Paris (and that was just standard, not anything fancy). Tickets for the three of us from Edinburgh to London were better, coming in at $125 total for all of us. But a cruise negates all of that by taking us from one place to the next while we only have to unpack one time. And we always have meals to come back to that we don’t have to plan for. And those meals are a known entity. We had some pretty meh food along the way.

Finally I have some thoughts specifically about Paris. Before this trip I was a little worried because I had heard Paris was dirty and touristy and the people were rude. First, maybe it’s because I’ve been to some big cities (London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC) but I didn’t find Paris to be dirty at all. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. I found it to be clean and honestly, it smells better than a lot of NYC. Yes, it’s obviously touristy. There are a lot of things there tourists want to see, but I went in understanding that but also trying to be strategic about where we went and when. And I think it helped to go earlier in the season. Finally, the people: we really didn’t encounter anyone rude or unkind. Honestly, everyone was super friendly, helpful and great. Nobody got snooty at me for my not great French. Mostly they just spoke back to me in English! The only rude French person we encountered was the lady at the British Airways check in desk who absolutely insisted that we check our carry on bag because our flights were full and she was sure there wouldn’t be room for it in the overhead bin. I really didn’t want to and she finally agreed to let us try to carry it. Spoiler alert: neither flight was full and we had no trouble putting the bag up in the bin. 

Overall, I think it was a really successful trip and we all had a good time!