A Traveling Kansas Girl: Craig's Travel Journal Day 17: Wednesday, June 1

Wednesday, June 1

Part of me is so ready to be home. Normally, after just a week of travel, I’m yearning for a home cooked meal and our own bed. That hasn’t been the case necessarily on this trip. For one, the bed on the ship—not to mention the meals—were good. Another part of it is the fact that we haven’t been in one place after the ship long enough to either a.) hate the bed, or b.) get sick of the local food. Part of it has also been that we’ve been on a foodie adventure too, going to two amazing restaurants and one theoretically amazing (well, at least the most expensive) dining experience. Still, I think I’m a few days over the trip, ready to go back to our regular routine.

Laura has told me I’ve overprogrammed the trip, no so much in terms of what we do when we get places, but in all the places we’ve had to get to. This is not the first time I’ve been accused of this. We could have cut a city or two and had a couple of down days during the trip so Laura could recharge a bit. That would have helped, I think.

Anyway, I let Laura sleep in rather than setting an alarm as I had planned. She awoke, and we got ready and headed for Les Halles, the largest subterranean train station in the world. We had hoped to find a bakery on the way so we could grab a little breakfast, but I was on the hunt for the station and evidently passed a place along the way. We got to the station, made our way down and got on our RER train for Marne le Valée, the stop for Disneyland Paris Resort.

Arriving an hour later, we went through Disney mag & bag security and went straight to Disney Studios Paris theme park—just to ride one ride for research. We went directly to the Ratatouille ride, then backtracked to try to find Laura some breakfast. She got a muffin off a cart but didn’t like it so we tossed that. We rode the ride, then left the park to go to Disneyland Paris. I knew we’d find something on Main Street, which we did. We got a croque monsieur and a pan con chocolat and a tea and coffee and sat at the sidewalk café to eat our late brunch.

Then we were off to explore the park, heading first to Space Mountain before the lines got too crazy. We only waited about 30 minutes in line. From there we roamed the park, visiting one attraction after another and noting the differences in, say, Pirates of the Caribbean or Small World. We had prearranged dinner reservations in the park’s in-attraction Blue Lagoon restaurant at the Pirates ride, but we quickly realized we would be done seeing everything (partially because the lines weren’t too bad and party because almost half the park it seemed was closed for seasonal rehab) before dinner ever rolled around. So we went for lunch and were able to grab a seat. This would never be possible in Disneyland. The restaurant is always booked from opening to closing with a waiting list hours long for standby. Still, we enjoyed a lunch as boat after boat from the ride passed by the gawk at us. After the fifth or sixth flash from a phone camera Laura started to threaten that she was going to throw bread rolls at the oncoming boats. I could just picture the lagoon scattered with bobbing fists of dough.

I love this photo of Laura. Laura loves purple. It works.

Laura inside Blue Lagoon restaurant inside Pirates of the Caribbean.

Phantom Manor.

The Jules Verne-inspired Space Mountain.

After lunch we headed to Phantom Manor, this park’s version of Haunted Mansion, located in Frontierland. That was our last stop, and by 4 pm we were on our way back to the in-resort train station to catch the next train back to Paris where we relaxed for a bit before pre-packing our bags for our next day of travel.

I went online and made dinner reservations for the place we couldn’t get into the first night in Paris and we went to there for a nice dinner, grabbed a bottle of French wine in a market on our way back and finished packing, checked email, and went to bed.