A French Disney home for the holidays…. COMPLETED - Page 37 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
Welcome! We're happy you've found the PassPorter Community -- the friendliest place to plan your vacation to Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Disneyland, and the world in general! You are now viewing the PassPorter Message Board Community as a guest, which gives you limited access. As our guest, feel free to browse our messages by selecting the forum you want to visit from the list below.
To post messages and ask questions, join our FREE community today and you'll get access to tools and resources not available to guests, such as our vacation countown timers, "living" avatars, private messaging system, database searches, downloads, and a special PassPorter discount code. Registration is fast, simple, and completely free. Just click the Join Our Community link.
If you think you've already joined, log in below now. If you don't remember your member name or password, please visit our Member Name and Password Recovery page. You are also welcome to contact us.
What a mess at the train station! Kids are really scared of escalators? Wow. The whole thought process seems to be lacking there. They're not even thinking 1 minute ahead, are they? Indeed, how do they all function in real life? Yikes.
I know, scary, isn't it?
Quote:
Anyway, glad your train was on time and you guys made it home quickly too! I can't believe Mark almost didn't get a meal. Premier seating should get priority!
You'd hope so, although right now, I guess anyone travelling on Eurostar today would just be lucky to be on a train and getting to their destination, given the fire in the tunnel yesterday....
Tanya
Every click helps feed .6 bowls of food to rescued animals. Give a quick click every day and help animals in shelters! www.theanimalrescuesite.com
Glad your train ride home went well! It just amazes me how stupid and clueless some of these parents are! Perhaps, these individuals had to sustain their idiocy to make sure they were in the running for this:
Sorry to hear about the snafus for your dinners on board, but at least it worked out!
__________________
October 6, 2017-Enjoying an amazing dinner at Victoria & Albert's with PP's Dot and Drew
My TR from my most recent trip is now underway. Includes: Universal Studios Florida, Disney World and Sea World Orlando Trifecta TR -Updated December 10th! TR is now COMPLETED!
I think we always say whenever we go to Disneyland Paris that we enjoy it more than we figured we would, and that was very much the case with this trip. Why is that, I wonder? I think part of it is that the elements we can’t stand about the parks here always stick with us.
This trip that included the awful climate – I mean come on Disney, everyone’s wondered this for the past 20 plus years, why did you build your parks somewhere that gets so much rain and sometimes snow in the winter? Often, as this visit proved, the weather can be downright mean, and trust me, I’ve done Disneyland Paris in January and that’s even meaner! Still, we’re stuck with it – the park isn’t going to be magically moved to the warmer climbs of Spain and Portugal, no matter how much we might wish it. You’d need more pixie dust than I think Tinkerbell has at her command…
The smoking in the parks really winds both of us, and I know from reading other people’s trip reports that I’m not alone in this. Why on earth Disney haven’t just tackled this head on by now, I do not know. I can only hope that now that the main Disney company has bought more of a stake in Paris, perhaps things will change, as it’s a really unpleasant part of a stay here…
Something they can’t do much about (unless you implement my excellent idea of passing a parenting class before you visit of course! ) is the poor behaviour by children and by their parents. Sadly, we saw far too much of that, and before you say that you get that at every Disney park, trust me, it feels a lot worse here. It’s like Disneyland Paris attracts the worst elements of the population, who think they can do what they like, and so can their kids. It really does not make for an appealing memory of Disneyland Paris.
Thankfully this trip, we did have some truly magical encounters with the characters, but this is another thing that Disneyland Paris seems just incapable of dealing with. Why they seem to prefer a melee around any character that comes out is just beyond me. Anyone who’s been to any other Disney park will be perfectly used to queuing up in an orderly line, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask people to do that here.
As our experience in Inventions showed as well, there is a definite predilection for favouring families over adults. Ok, part of me can say that, but isn’t part of the Disney ethos also that, for the time you’re in that magical bubble, we’re all children again? We certainly are, and therefore we expect to be able to enjoy the characters the same as kids do.
That said, I did have some truly magical experiences with Eeyore this trip, and they will stay with me for a very long time. If anyone had told me that would happen here, I’d have told them they were completely insane, as I just never expected it to happen here. Mark was also able to finally have some really good fun with Captain Hook, which I knew would happen, if we ever got to see him – and that was definitely going to happen!
We were also very lucky with the crowds, although then again, given the deal we got and the time of year we were visiting (with the schools midway through a term), I did expect them to be low. The difference between weekends and weekdays is so stark here. What we saw in the parks on Saturday bore no resemblance to our experiences on either the Thursday, Friday or Monday. If you possibly can, always time any trip here for weekdays, as they are just so much quieter.
One of the main reasons for coming here was to try out the new Ratatouille ride, and we managed that, twice. It really is an amazing piece of ride engineering and a definite “do not miss” at this park. I really don’t know any other park that’s got anything like it, although having said that, we haven’t been to Universal in some years. However, I suspect anything similar they do have are for coaster geeks, and we aren’t that at all, so we were delighted to be able to enjoy this.
As for the area of the park that they’ve created around this ride, it was just beautiful, although I do feel very sad that they’ve created it only for one ride and one restaurant. I was expecting more, shops at least, and I do hope that those are coming sometime soon.
I want to just say here about getting here, as that is a key part to any vacation. We haven’t taken the Eurostar to Disneyland Paris since 2003, as usually it’s so much cheaper to take the Eurotunnel and drive. Of course, that isn’t particularly relaxing, and the train is a much easier way to go, especially when you can catch a direct train to your destination, and your hotel is literally just a few minutes’ walk away from there. If we can do, I’d definitely take the Eurostar in the future again over the driving option.
One of the other things I was looking forward to was revisiting a couple of restaurants that haven’t disappointed in the past. I know everyone thinks of France and thinks superb dining, but I have to say Disneyland Paris has long been a disappointment in this respect. We regularly find the quality of the food served in Florida to be much superior to here, which I just find insulting, given the French’s culinary history. Thankfully Walt’s delivered once again, and despite the issue with getting the characters to come and see us at Inventions, the food there was also excellent, as it had been four years ago when we last dined here.
Bistrot Chez Remy is definitely a superb addition to the dining line-up here, offering wonderful food in some brilliant theming. I just hope it soon finds itself, and is attracting more people, as it was disappointing to see it so empty the night we dined there. It would be a great shame to see it closed if it’s not better patronised… The Steakhouse certainly wasn’t bad, and given what we paid for the food, you can’t expect too much, and we came away, saying that it was better than many other places here.
Although it’s not food, the real find for us this trip was Café Fantasia. I’m so glad we went there on day one, as all too often, we find places we like near the end of the vacation. I think the fact that we were in there every night is testament to how much we liked the theming in there.
And that brings me to the Disneyland Hotel. We’ve always said this is the place to stay, especially after our first stay here in the summer of 2010. Sadly, it’s usually overpriced and therefore out of our range, but thankfully this time we were able to return there. Its location is second to none, and if, as happened to us, it starts to tip with rain and you’ve just had enough of the parks, it’s just a short walk from the park entrances, unlike the other hotels that are the other side of the Disney Village. I think the fact that we didn’t even get as far as them this trip tells you something…
Did we do everything we wanted to? I think we pretty much did. I certainly got everything done in Paris that I wanted to see, and we don’t have much of a list when it comes to the parks. In the Disneyland Park, it’s our old favourites, the Phantom Manor and Pirates of the Caribbean, plus I enjoy doing some of the other rides if we can get on them. One of the hidden gems was the holiday version of It’s A Small World. I’ve never seen Mark keen about getting back on that for a second time in a trip, which tells you something…
At the Studios, there are a couple of must-dos for us, outside of the new Ratatouille ride, and those are Cinemagique, Stitch Live, and Animagique. See all three of these shows, and to me, you’ve got the essence of what the Studios are all about. Sure, there’s much more here – Tower of Terror, Rock’n’Roller Coaster, Crush’s Coaster to name but a few big draws, but as we’re not coaster fans, they don’t do anything for us.
All in all, it was a wonderful trip, and a very welcome break for us, as apart from days out, we hadn’t had a proper break together since our Med cruise and Italian road trip back in July, and real life has presented a few issues for both of us since then, shall we just say? I certainly found it very relaxing, and I wouldn’t rule out a return (do I ever? ) although I really would like to go back and stay at the Disneyland Hotel of course…
A great wrap-up, Cheryl! I'm glad you were able to take advantage of the great hotel deal. Staying at the Disneyland Hotel sounds just perfect, and it sounds like being at that nice hotel so close to the parks enhanced your enjoyment despite the crummy weather. I love train travel and the Eurostar couldn't be more convenient, both to the parks and to where you live! I hope they do add more to the Remy section of the studios. From the photos it looks more like Epcot's France than the real thing, but that's ok!
Thanks for another great trip report, Chez! So glad you enjoyed the new Ratatouille ride As you know, I am with you on the annoyances at DLP Oh how I wish they'd address those issues...
Disneyland Hotel is high up on my bucket list but sadly, so far I haven't been able to find a good deal for it. One of these days, though!
Sorry for the troubles at the train station! Glad Mark was able to get his dinner in the end! Love his new hat! What a great weekend you guys had, and you got so much done! Thanks for taking us along for the ride!
I'm glad that over all you had a great trip. Sorry about the on going problems at Disneyland Paris.
All your pictures were beautiful and I enjoying following along with you on your trip.
Liz
As with every trip, positives and negatives. It looks like the negatives are always repeat offenders, so at least you're used to them even if they still are very annoying! So it sounds like the positives won out in this trip. Yay!
I still think there should be some more thought put into that parenting class though...
__________________
Tanya
Every click helps feed .6 bowls of food to rescued animals. Give a quick click every day and help animals in shelters! www.theanimalrescuesite.com
A great wrap-up, Cheryl! I'm glad you were able to take advantage of the great hotel deal. Staying at the Disneyland Hotel sounds just perfect, and it sounds like being at that nice hotel so close to the parks enhanced your enjoyment despite the crummy weather.
It really did, and honestly if we'd stayed anywhere, with the weather, we'd have had a miserable time.
Quote:
I love train travel and the Eurostar couldn't be more convenient, both to the parks and to where you live!
It's very convenient, provided nothing goes wrong, like the fire in the tunnel over the weekend. I would not have wanted to be travelling to Disneyland Paris over the last 48 hours or so.
Quote:
I hope they do add more to the Remy section of the studios. From the photos it looks more like Epcot's France than the real thing, but that's ok!
It is beautiful, and I'd hope that in France, they'd get a representation of France spot on.
Thanks for another great trip report, Chez! So glad you enjoyed the new Ratatouille ride As you know, I am with you on the annoyances at DLP Oh how I wish they'd address those issues...
If only!
Quote:
Disneyland Hotel is high up on my bucket list but sadly, so far I haven't been able to find a good deal for it. One of these days, though!
Keep looking, as I wasn't expecting to find such a good deal, and we lucked out!
About This Page: 
PassPorter Guide Author
I can't believe Mark almost didn't get a meal. Premier seating should get priority!
Like
Thank
Pixie Dust
It just amazes me how stupid and clueless some of these parents are! 
Perhaps, these individuals had to sustain their idiocy to make sure they were in the running for this: 
Still, we’re stuck with it – the park isn’t going to be magically moved to the warmer climbs of Spain and Portugal, no matter how much we might wish it. You’d need more pixie dust than I think Tinkerbell has at her command… 
I can only hope that now that the main Disney company has bought more of a stake in Paris, perhaps things will change, as it’s a really unpleasant part of a stay here… 
Mark was also able to finally have some really good fun with Captain Hook, which I knew would happen, if we ever got to see him – and that was definitely going to happen! 
) although I really would like to go back and stay at the Disneyland Hotel of course… 
Oh how I wish they'd address those issues...
What a great weekend you guys had, and you got so much done! 
Linear Mode
