Sorry for the delay folks! Our highs and lows from our first ever trip.
Highs
Hotel New York - very nice. Our room was lovely and breakfast was really nice. Lots of chance to meet Mickey, Minnie and Chip n Dale with a very short wait time.
DLP generally looked absolutely gorgeous.
Dreams - Amazing. I'm a 37 year old man not really into that sort of thing but I had goosebumps
Cast members. Almost without exception (see lows!) they were really lovely, friendly and helpful if my son (who uses a wheelchair) needed help.
Cafe Mickey and Annettes - both excellent. Good food, friendly staff (a big black guy in Annettes, about 50?, don't recall his name especially was really good). Lots of characters in Cafe Mickey.
Rides - especially liked POTC, Space Mountain, IASW, BTM, Tower of Terror. Buzz Lightyear - the ride stopped for 30s next to one of the big baddies so I got a good aim at their chest target and ended up with 350,000
Weather - no rain all week (well 5 minutes drizzle on the last day), sunny but not too hot.
Lows
Mostly very minor things.
Air France - forgot my son's wheelchair (or at least took ages to find it from the hold) getting off the plane at CDG which led to him being rather stressed. When he gets stressed me can have a bit of an emotional meltdown which he did.
CDG airport. Huge! but also seems very oddly laid out. I've flown from big airports before but never had to go so far from where I got off the aircraft to where my bags were unloaded etc.
Check in at HNY. For some reason they hadn't printed out our tickets etc. We had a puzzled looking receptionist looking at a screen and through all that days arrival packs for ten minutes, then saying that ours "had been left at the other reception area by mistake" which was clearly a euphamism for "we forgot to print it and I'm going to go and print it all now" All easily sorted though.
HNY pool - as discussed on here, 5ft deep throughout, not the best thing for the kids but we managed.
Walts. We had a reservation, but when we got there the lift was broken so we couldn't eat there. This was the one time we had disappointing service from a cast member. She was very young and didn't really seem to care. Her attitude was "the lift is broken, that's just tough really". She could have found out if it was going to be fixed before we went home and made us a resrvation for another night and she could have found out other places we could go to eat that night and made us a reservation there, but she wasn't interested. All she did, after we asked, was to point us vaguely in the direction of Plaza Gardens, which is where we ended up going.
Didn't get to go on Crush's Coaster.
Our kids were too wussy to go on BTM so I had to go on by myself
Ezeshuttle - they were generally very good, but on the way home we were staying a last night at the Novotel at CDG before an early flight. I didn't realise there were two Novotels at/near CDG and they took us to the wrong one! I checked our emails later and we definitely told them the other one. By the time we'd realised the driver had gone. But the hotel were very helpful and got someone to drive us straight round to the correct hotel, so no real harm done.
They could IMO do with one more "extreme" ride. But it's not Alton Towers I guess
General observations
It was very busy. We had an easy access pass for any rides etc my son wanted to go on, so it wasn't really an issue for us. I wouldn't have wanted to be there at that time of year if we'd had to queue for everything.
We seemed to have to carry lots of paperwork - room keys, park tickets, hotel easy pass, disabled easy pass, shareholders card etc and getting them out and putting them away was a very minor hassle. It would be nice if DLP could give you a smart card with all the info on so you only had one thing to carry!
We'll be back some day. Possibly not for a few years when the kids are a bit bigger though.
Highs
Hotel New York - very nice. Our room was lovely and breakfast was really nice. Lots of chance to meet Mickey, Minnie and Chip n Dale with a very short wait time.
DLP generally looked absolutely gorgeous.
Dreams - Amazing. I'm a 37 year old man not really into that sort of thing but I had goosebumps
Cast members. Almost without exception (see lows!) they were really lovely, friendly and helpful if my son (who uses a wheelchair) needed help.
Cafe Mickey and Annettes - both excellent. Good food, friendly staff (a big black guy in Annettes, about 50?, don't recall his name especially was really good). Lots of characters in Cafe Mickey.
Rides - especially liked POTC, Space Mountain, IASW, BTM, Tower of Terror. Buzz Lightyear - the ride stopped for 30s next to one of the big baddies so I got a good aim at their chest target and ended up with 350,000
Weather - no rain all week (well 5 minutes drizzle on the last day), sunny but not too hot.
Lows
Mostly very minor things.
Air France - forgot my son's wheelchair (or at least took ages to find it from the hold) getting off the plane at CDG which led to him being rather stressed. When he gets stressed me can have a bit of an emotional meltdown which he did.
CDG airport. Huge! but also seems very oddly laid out. I've flown from big airports before but never had to go so far from where I got off the aircraft to where my bags were unloaded etc.
Check in at HNY. For some reason they hadn't printed out our tickets etc. We had a puzzled looking receptionist looking at a screen and through all that days arrival packs for ten minutes, then saying that ours "had been left at the other reception area by mistake" which was clearly a euphamism for "we forgot to print it and I'm going to go and print it all now"
All easily sorted though.HNY pool - as discussed on here, 5ft deep throughout, not the best thing for the kids but we managed.
Walts. We had a reservation, but when we got there the lift was broken so we couldn't eat there. This was the one time we had disappointing service from a cast member. She was very young and didn't really seem to care. Her attitude was "the lift is broken, that's just tough really". She could have found out if it was going to be fixed before we went home and made us a resrvation for another night and she could have found out other places we could go to eat that night and made us a reservation there, but she wasn't interested. All she did, after we asked, was to point us vaguely in the direction of Plaza Gardens, which is where we ended up going.
Didn't get to go on Crush's Coaster.
Our kids were too wussy to go on BTM so I had to go on by myself
Ezeshuttle - they were generally very good, but on the way home we were staying a last night at the Novotel at CDG before an early flight. I didn't realise there were two Novotels at/near CDG and they took us to the wrong one! I checked our emails later and we definitely told them the other one. By the time we'd realised the driver had gone. But the hotel were very helpful and got someone to drive us straight round to the correct hotel, so no real harm done.
They could IMO do with one more "extreme" ride. But it's not Alton Towers I guess
General observations
It was very busy. We had an easy access pass for any rides etc my son wanted to go on, so it wasn't really an issue for us. I wouldn't have wanted to be there at that time of year if we'd had to queue for everything.
We seemed to have to carry lots of paperwork - room keys, park tickets, hotel easy pass, disabled easy pass, shareholders card etc and getting them out and putting them away was a very minor hassle. It would be nice if DLP could give you a smart card with all the info on so you only had one thing to carry!
We'll be back some day. Possibly not for a few years when the kids are a bit bigger though.
