OctoberThis month Daniel got his B-certificate for swimming. That was greatly due to the efforts of the swimming instructors to keep him on track: people were always on hand to guide him and to remind him that he needed to turn a corner, use a different stroke etc. One of the swimming masters said that it was funny to see how, even when they were doing a floating exercise, Daniel’s head would come up so he could check what the other children were doing. Physically he his highly capable, his challenge is coping with all the different steps.
Daniel genuinely loves swimming, so he will go on for his C-certificate, so both he and Falco will continue with swimming lessons.
We managed a weekend off while the children were at Pharos camp: our friends Saskia and Brandaan took us out to eat at the excellent Lambermons. Marjolein had a basketball game so we could not entirely clear our schedule, but we did manage a sauna after the game: wonderfully relaxing.
It was good month for socialising: we had people over to eat, Falco had a sleep-over, Marjolein went to Deventer to help some friends move house and I popped down to Brussels to check on my Mother’s house while she was in Britain, taking the opportunity to drop in on my friend Dirk and celebrate his birthday with him.
The biggest event was our trip to Disneyland Paris: I booked a group trip via my work, which rejoiced the children, while slightly depressing Marjolein: she was not looking forward to a long coach trip with a lot of total strangers… The bus trip was in fact ok. We had to get up horribly early, but after that it was pretty restful. The kiddos are pretty used to long rides by now and settled down easily with books and Marjolein caught forty winks. We arrived about three in the afternoon and, after some kerfuffle with keys and rooms were able to go straight into the parks. Marjolein’s experience with Disneyland in the States was useful and we spent the first afternoon in the slightly smaller and very much less crowded Disney Studio park, which meant we managed to see everything we wanted in a couple of hourse. Yay optimal planning, except for the matter of food. When we got hungry we found that everything was full or had humungous queues. The most feasible turned out to be MacDonalds, but we learned our lesson and immediately booked a restaurant for the next evening: Mickey’s Café, because it looked the coolest.
If you sleep in a Disney hotel you can go to the parks two hours early in the morning, so we set a horribly early alarm (again) jumped out of our beds and ransacked the breakfast buffet. As we walked off towards the park we saw that huge queues were forming for breakfast. Being early birds is not generally our style, but it paid off handsomely this time. We hit the main park this time and got a nice scenic bus-ride right up to the Magic Castle. It was a nice bright day and in the early hours we managed to do some very nice rides without horrible queues. We also made use of the fast-pass system a few times: you go away and come back at a set time and can walk straight through to the ride (i.e. the queue is pretty short).
As the morning wore on the park filled up enormously, so after a long queue for lunch we sloped off the Adventureland (more of Marjolein’s experience in play there) where the attractions are more of a walk-around-and-look-at-it variety. We were pretty tired by then, but the children ran off enthusiastically and, horror of horrors, Falco and Daniel vanished. We scrambled after them and eventually found Daniel, but Falco was nowhere to be seen. We were terrified, but when we asked a park-person he immediately took some information, called a number to check, told us that Falco had been found and was safe and gave us a marked map to where he was. Our relief was enormous: that is when you appreciate the enormous, competent Disney machinery. Falco was sitting quietly in a nursery with a colouring picture and crayons being watched by two professional nursery attendants. I am not always a fan of the Mouse Empire, but keeping my kiddo safe when I lost track of him earns them many gold stars.
By then it was time to gently head off to our dinner reservation, which we were extremely glad of. The food was not great, but there was a continuous stream of cheerful Disney characters going past the table, so Marjolein got snap happy. Daniel got to hug Mickey but Matthijs did not feel comfortable hugging cartoon characters, he is a bit too big and manly for that now that he is ten whole years old. We got to sit down, eat something that was not a hamburger, have a bottle of wine and reasonable coffee. They also had a dessert buffet for the kids: they could load as much cake and as many sweeties as they liked onto their plates. Daniel went away for ages and came back with an elaborate art-work entirely constructed out of sweets: he was more interested in making a nice pattern than in eating dessert. Once the other boys saw his creation they made their own versions: the fate of any original thinker. As we dined we saw huuuge queues forming at all the eateries: we sat back smugly, glad we had made a reservation. To Disney’s credit their brochure strongly advises you to do this and has a single phone number for all the restaurants.
We trundled out again and managed to hit a couple more major rides (Peter Pan and Pirates of the Caribbean) on the way home. On the last leg of our walk back to the hotel, filled with a heady sense of our Disney-logistics pwnage we made our first and only major blunder. We queued up for a very simple ride that we thought Falco would like and discovered, ten minutes in, that the queue had five more loops than we had realized. Once you are stuck in one of those people-processing queues there is not way to bail out without making many, many people unhappy. We should still have done so, because it was another 35 minutes before we got on the ride and it was definitely not, nottedy, not worth it.
We crawled back to the hotel, sunk into bed and set the alarm early again. It was truly challenging to get up the next morning, but once again we were able to get breakfast before any lines formed, stuffed ourselves with petit-pain au chocolat and headed out for the early session in the park. We had planned (yay logistics and yes it was Marjolein’s planning) to hit the major rides we had not yet done. Top of the list was Space Mountain, for me and Daniel because Falco was too young and Matthijs is not so much for the throw-you-around rides. Marjolein took the other two into Buzz Lightyear and they had a good time zapping aliens. Daniel and I utterly relished Space Mountain: it is an underground roller-coaster with wonderful laser-light effects. You shoot off in a steam-punk themed rocket car, carom wildly around glowing planets and get turned upside down and inside out without any visual clues to warn you what is happening. You miss the view down the long slope of a normal coaster but the continual disorientation is a worthy replacement. Daniel laughed harder with each new twist and came out of it exhilarated and not frightened one little bit.
We all joined up to go on the Star Wars shuttle ride (very cool) for a second time, got the bejazus scared out of us in the Tower of Terror and then hit Frontierland as the park started to fill up with day-trippers. We wandered around happily, going on a restful river-boat ride and had an early lunch with live western music before other people got hungry and the queues built up. When left the fast-food barn we found we were right on top of a live Halloween show with singing Ghostly Donald, Witchy Minnie Mouse and Cruella De Ville. The whole park was Halloween themed and it was stunning how much sheer creative muscle the Mouse has: there were pumpkin-men decorations every where in the park and no two were the same. There were dozens upon dozens of elaborate HallowDisneyeen bits of scenery designed for you to perch your kids on so you could take a cool picture (see the pictures we took). There were lots of Halloween live shows with all the Disney villains… Disney may be a giant soulless corporation, but it Disneyland Paris is anything to go by they have the ability to be highly creative on a massive scale and with tremendous attention to detail.
After that it was time to get back on the bus, where we found that many people had done less and been way more frustrated than us. We also discovered that Disney had given all of France a super-cheapo offer on the Saturday we were there, which explained the tremendous crush that obliterated our second afternoon. That can of course always happen, so it is very well worth getting up very early and beating the queues, getting very clear what you want to get into and going there first: yay logistics and planning. Marjolein was of course bushed, fell asleep in the bus and does not intend to ever go back: she has crossed this off her lists of “things I must do for my children”. But we did have a good time.
