travels, races, and other musings

Another early morning but we had planned it because it was really our best option to ride Hyperspace Mountain, because it had been closed for refurbishment the rest of the days we were there. Except that you already know we got to ride it anyway. It’s okay, we were happy to ride it again. After that we gave Big Thunder another go before going back for a sit-down breakfast in Disney Village. We made it back to the room in time to finish getting packed and ready give our bags to the front desk so we could catch a little more park time.  We caught a bunch of shows (including the phenomenal “Mickey and the Magician”), checked out the new Frozen section of Adventure World, caught a fun marching band and had lunch prior to going back to the hotel to grab our bags and then we took the free shuttle to the train station to catch a train to Paris. We got checked into our AirBnB, which was actually two apartments on the same floor of a building in a little suburb of Paris. Dru had one tiny s...

We woke up extra early to take advantage of the extra hour before park opening that hotel guests get. We figured this was our best opportunity to ride Crush’s Coaster without a long line (or paying for a fast pass or whatever they call it). I will say that while it was great to ride without the crowds, the breakfast situation at DLP is really less than ideal if you’re doing this. There isn’t any quick service at the hotel we were staying at (not sure about others) and all the counter service stuff at Disney Village doesn’t open until 8 AM, at which point you already need to be in line for the early entry at 8:30, so I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do. We snacked on some snacks/bread/dry cereal we had brought along from home and from London and that Dru had brought, which wasn’t really much.  Crush’s Coaster was great and we hit some other rides before watching the parade at Disneyland, which was sort of a sister to Festival of Fantasy at Magic Kingdom park at Walt Disney World...

Another tube strike day so we took an Uber to the train station and I gave us a lot of extra time, which is good because we arrived pretty much at the time we were instructed to be at St. Pancras to catch the Eurostar (7:45 AM for a 9:00 AM departure).  We boarded the train and it was a pretty quick trip to Lille. I actually thought it was longer but I forgot about the time change to an hour later. We arrived in Lille at 11:24 and we had found some lunch options in town, but ultimately just decided to have some lunch in the station when the weather was looking rainy outside, plus the fact that the restaurants didn’t open until noon. Oops. We ended up having to deal with the rain anyway to get from the Lille Europe station to the other Lille station that handled more of the local trains. We made our way through a total downpour and got our train to Paris Marne-La-Vallée - Chessy - Disneyland which left Lille at 12:56 and got into Disneyland Paris at 2:10 PM.  We were meeting up...