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Old 10 Sep 19, 10:11 PM  
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Gill H
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Join Date: Jan 08
Location: South Wales

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Just Can't Wait to be King of the Swingers! DLP Sep 2019: Pre-trippie

Hello and welcome to our September 2019 DLP trip report!

In case you have only just found us, we are Gill and Peter, longtime Dibbers, veteran DLP-goers and occasional visitors to other Disney parks, resorts and even ships.



Oh, and now we’re podcasters too, on the Dibb’s very own podcast “The Great British Mickey Waffle”.




Some of our experiences from this trip will pop up on the podcast, hopefully in video form as well as audio. But meanwhile, sit back and enjoy the written version!

We live in London with a cute 2 year old tortoiseshell cat called Cookie, who will be looked after by our good friend Jo while we’re gone.



So – how did this trip start? Well, we’ve been visiting DLP almost every year now since 2008 (except for the years we did WDW) so it was pretty much a foregone conclusion we would go this year. Our last trip was November 2018 for the Christmas season, and you can read about it here.

Currently we are saving hard for a big trip next year to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. So we knew this year’s trip would need to be a budget one. We started to put money aside for annual passes, which would cover our 2019 and 2020 trips (oh yes, there will be a 2020 trip – a friend is celebrating a Big Birthday at DLP next spring and we are invited!)

So we started thinking about what time of year to go. As we don’t have children we can go in term time, so we avoided the summer holidays. Given the 41C temps Paris had this summer, I think that was probably a wise decision!

We decided on September, to allow us to catch the Rendezvous Gourmand food festival, and also the Lion King and Jungle Book festival. Which explains the name of the trippie. Just as the festival combines two classic films, we have combined two of their most iconic songs. Well, it was either that or ‘The Bare Hakunas’…
__________________
DLP: day trips 2000, 2003; Cheyenne Sep 2009, Feb 2011, Nov 2018; Sequoia Lodge June 2008, May 2012; Elysee May 2012, Jan 2013, Sep 2013; Disneyland Hotel Mar 2015, Santa Fe Nov 2016; Newport Bay Sep 2017, Ibis Sep 2019, Hotel NY Art of Marvel Nov 2021
WDW: Port Orleans Riverside Dec 10; SSR Nov 14

Edited at 06:46 PM.
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Old 10 Sep 19, 10:12 PM  
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Gill H
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Join Date: Jan 08
Location: South Wales

theDIBB Guidebook
Guidebook Photos: 86
Guidebook Reviews: 24
So the next step was to book Eurostar tickets. In order to maximise our time we checked out the various options and decided to go for changing at Lille. This came in at a total of £196 between us, which is a serious bargain if you can’t get the elusive cheap tickets for the direct train. It even worked out slightly cheaper than going via Gare du Nord. We’ve changed at Lille before, but that was at Lille Europe station where we just had to stay on the same platform for 40 minutes. This time is slightly more complicated – but only slightly!

Our train leaves St Pancras at 6.47 (which means we need to get up at half past bleugh and get an early taxi), and arrives in Lille Europe at 9.26 French time. Then we have a quick 5 minute walk to the nearby Lille Flandres station, to get our 10.20 train to Marne la Vallee where we arrive at 11.28 am.

Coming home, we leave DLP at 18.52, arrive in Lille Europe at 19.56 and will go through security there. Hopefully this is a more pleasant experience than the ‘human cattle shed’ that is the pre-Eurostar security at Marne la Vallee. We have just over an hour to do this, so hopefully will have a chance to pick up a few last minute souvenirs or at least grab a coffee. Our train then leaves Lille Europe at 21.00, and because of the magic of timezones, we arrive back in London at 21.33! From there it will be home on the tube, to be welcomed home by Cookie before we fall into bed exhausted.

Transport sorted, the next thing to arrange was a hotel. Now, much as we love staying onsite, the hotel prices don’t make it easy. And since the Walt Disney Company took full ownership of DLP, the rates have skyrocketed. There are still occasional bargains to be had – but you have to search. And since we had already decided to get annual passes on this trip, we figured an offsite stay would make the best use of our money.
We’ve stayed in the Val d’Europe area before and find it very easy to get to the parks. It’s just a 5 minute journey on the RER, or you can use the free bus when it’s running. However, it doesn’t start early enough to get to the parks for Extra Magic Time, so I suspect we’ll be on the RER more often than not.

We eventually settled on the Ibis Val d’Europe. We have stayed in several Ibis hotels before. They aren’t exactly luxurious but they tend to be modern and clean, and provide a decent place to stay for a few nights. There are actually two Ibis hotels in the immediate area, the other being an Ibis Budget. We did consider this but thought it might be just a little too ‘budget’ for us this time.

Incidentally, you need to be careful when booking this hotel. There are several Ibis hotels in Marne la Vallee, and it’s possible to end up in the wrong one much further away! We have booked the nearest one … we hope…! And the cost for 3 nights was £226.56 (plus 1 Euro per person per night ‘city tax’ which we need to pay at the hotel).

We are hoping to continue the ‘budget’ theme with some offsite meals. Food at DLP doesn’t come cheap, even with annual pass discount (or indeed the discount we still get from the former Shareholder Club). So we’ve investigated some nearby options.
Vapiano was on the list until we read a few horror stories on a certain review site. Now OK, we take that site with a pinch of salt usually – but there were several recent accounts of hygiene lapses that made us decide to go elsewhere.

The plan at the moment is so loose as to be practically non-existent, but it involves at some point:

• Buying Annual Passes
• Eating at the Rendezvous Gourmand
• Seeing the Lion King show at the new theatre (scary queues permitting)
• Seeing the Jungle Jive show
• Eating at several new offsite places

Plus, well, the usual mix of rides, shows, merch and food that constitutes a DLP trip!
Check back soon to find out how it went.
__________________
DLP: day trips 2000, 2003; Cheyenne Sep 2009, Feb 2011, Nov 2018; Sequoia Lodge June 2008, May 2012; Elysee May 2012, Jan 2013, Sep 2013; Disneyland Hotel Mar 2015, Santa Fe Nov 2016; Newport Bay Sep 2017, Ibis Sep 2019, Hotel NY Art of Marvel Nov 2021
WDW: Port Orleans Riverside Dec 10; SSR Nov 14
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Old 21 Aug 20, 06:44 PM  
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Gill H
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VIP Dibber
 
Join Date: Jan 08
Location: South Wales

theDIBB Guidebook
Guidebook Photos: 86
Guidebook Reviews: 24
Well, this has to count as the longest gap ever in my trippie writing history. It's almost a year since we went to DLP.

This is the trippie that almost didn’t get written. We visited DLP in September 2019, and soon afterwards we decided we needed to move from London to Wales to be near my elderly parents. For the next few months our lives were in a constant state of upheaval. Then came the move, settling down, getting used to new (and longer) work days and extra responsibilities. And just as we had started to get used to it, along came lockdown and changed everything again.

We’ve also had to postpone our planned trip to Tokyo this November to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Realistically, we’ve decided it’s better to wait until next year – with the added bonus that another year of saving means we should be able to afford an onsite Disney hotel for part of the trip. Those places look gorgeous but they don’t come cheap.

Once we made the decision to postpone, we decided that since we’d got some annual leave booked, we might as well use part of it to celebrate our anniversary in another way – and so a DLP trip has been booked for November. Of course at the moment we can’t guarantee it will happen, but it does mean we are re-immersing ourselves in all things DLP, and that means I can’t have an unwritten trip report silently scolding me. It needs to get done!

The other thing that put me off writing was that I particularly struggled on this trip, due to the heat. I can hear the Florida veterans laughing, but I really don’t deal well with heat. That, and the fact that I had really sore feet much of the time, put a damper (ha!) on the enjoyment. Oh, and as you’ll see, we made a few very bad mistakes that threatened to wipe the pixie dust off the day a few times. But still, DLP is our home, and we love it. And there were some great things about this trip, particularly the Lion King/Jungle Book festival stuff which gave this trippie its title, which deserve to be documented.

So – pour yourself a drink and settle down for the story of:

DLP Sep 19: Just Can’t Wait To Be King Of The Swingers!

>>>Day 1


INDEX
__________________
DLP: day trips 2000, 2003; Cheyenne Sep 2009, Feb 2011, Nov 2018; Sequoia Lodge June 2008, May 2012; Elysee May 2012, Jan 2013, Sep 2013; Disneyland Hotel Mar 2015, Santa Fe Nov 2016; Newport Bay Sep 2017, Ibis Sep 2019, Hotel NY Art of Marvel Nov 2021
WDW: Port Orleans Riverside Dec 10; SSR Nov 14

Edited at 07:15 AM.
Gill H is offline Girl Mouse Click to view Members Trip Plans Add Member to Ignore List
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