At Last I See The Light - DLP August 2020 Day 1 Monday 10th August 2020

[Goldia]

Day 1 – Monday 10th August 2020

I don’t suppose it would surprise anyone to find out that I had the worst nights sleep last night I don’t tend to sleep that well into travel day, I usually put that down to a combination of being really excited and staying in a hotel so not my own bed. I’d hoped that I would be ok as we weren’t in an airport hotel, and actually I did manage to drop off fairly quickly, but after 2 hours I woke up . I felt like it was morning, but looking at the clock it was 1.06am .

In the end I got up and checked my phone as I kept expecting to see that the Government would announce overnight that France was on the no-go list and that we wouldn’t even be able to start the trip. At 3am I went back to bed and I did manage another 2 hours 28 minutes of sleep so that was it. Ha, ha who needs sleep before travel day? I figured I’d try and have a nap on the train. Yeah, right, like that was going to happen!

We had set the alarm for 6am as we needed to be at our local station to catch the 7.28am train to St Pancras.

I had booked these tickets yesterday afternoon. I wondered if the train would be busy with commuters, but it was pretty quiet all the way to London.

Dave was texting me on the train as somehow Max’s phone had broken and he couldn’t use wi-fi. Honestly I don’t know what that boy does with his phones, if it’s not a smashed screen then it’s something else. I didn’t really care at this point what Dave did about Max’s phone as I was constantly checking the BBC news app for updates expecting to see we couldn’t travel to France

St Pancras station is not one that I am very familiar with, but we soon found the entrance to the Eurostar.

They were handing out paper copies of the SWORN statement we had to complete for travelling to France, basically you sign to say you haven’t had any COVID symptoms recently. I had already done ours and so waved these at the gate, but no one actually looked at them or read them.

Some of the seats in the departure lounge were marked with crosses as they were to be left empty. It did feel pretty busy in here, but even so we found a spot to sit down and await our train. There were a few other trains listed as leaving this morning.

Our 10.14am departure time had been put back to 10.34am as the train was not going to stop at Ebbsfleet or at Ashford. We were assured that even with this 20 minute delayed leaving time we would still arrive on time and they were right we did.

In the departure lounge there were lots of announcements about maintaining your social distance and about making sure to wear your mask properly. They also explained that Disney Express staff would not board the train today so if you wanted to check in using this service you had to do it at the station when you arrived. We weren’t that bothered about it as we’d wanted to walk through the Disney Village anyway and check in at the hotel.

When it was our turn to board the Eurostar we found there was only one other family in our coach. So, 6 people in a coach for 76 (I counted!) definitely enough space to social distance.

I’d brought some disinfectant bathroom wipes from home in my back pack as I’d wanted to clean the seat back tables and wipe everything down. I’d intended to do this before every meal in the parks too, but actually I soon stopped worrying about it.

Kate watched some shows she’d downloaded from Netflix and I tried to get some sleep, but I realised pretty quickly that was not going to happen. Besides Kate was ready to start on our picnic lunch that we had packed! It was only 11am, but heck we may as well eat as that meant we didn’t have to wear our masks. We watched Friday Night Dinner together and Kate opened her Dr Pepper (she was cross that Tesco hadn’t got Cherry Coke).

Soon we moved onto Pringles and cookies.

I’d wanted to top up the charge on my phone and had a USB in my back pack so Kate got down on the floor to see what the charging points were between the seats, but it’s only a plug point and I couldn’t be bothered to get the case down as that was pretty heavy with it’s load of cans of coke and G&T.

But I made mental note for the return trip to include a plug in the back pack.

We did stop at Lille, but no one got on or off on our coach and we were soon on our way. The journey felt very quick, barely 2 hours 20 minutes actually. I finally started to relax as there were still no announcements from the Government and now we were on French soil I knew we’d at least get our holiday.

It was exciting to arrive at DLP station and as we got off the train we followed the other family, but soon realised they were going the wrong way on the platform.

I had given Kate my phone to take some photos of Disney Village as we’d agreed we would walk rather than catch the bus to the hotel, so she got a photo of me telling the other family they were going the wrong way.

Then she took a photo on the escalator.

And another photo of her feet

The mum from the other family asked how to get to hotel Santa Fe and I said we were going to walk, but as they had a lot of luggage and smaller children I suggested it would be better for them to get the bus.

I think Kate got bored waiting for me.

It was hot, but there was a little bit of a breeze and as we’d been sitting down for a couple of hours we wanted to walk through the Village, plus we wanted a bit of Disney magic.
The music they play on the Disney Village radio soon gets you in the mood and Kate took lots of photos as we walked through.

To get into the Village from the station you have to go through the airport style security scanners with bags put on the conveyor belt, but that was fine and we didn’t mind.

World of Disney, not looking too busy is it?

Lots and lots of photos taken by Kate and the walk through the Village probably took about 10 minutes in the end as we were looking at every shop window.

Out the other side of the village and past the security by the walk around the lake is lovely.

We realised when we were walking past the New York hotel there were no other people in sight and we felt like we could take our masks off at this point. We kept hold of them so we could put them back on swiftly if we saw people coming. This hotel was being refurbed when we came in February 2019 and is still being refurbed now.

This is a really lovely walk, albeit very hot today, but it's beautiful.

Kate was enjoying taking photos of the reflections in the water.

Hidden Mickey!

Past Sequoia Lodge, which wasn’t open.

The walk alongside the canal was pleasant as it was in the shade.

Lots of pretty trees, we were so happy to be there.

And onto Santa Fe.

We soon found reception and received a warm welcome

They were handing out iced water, which Kate gratefully accepted for two reasons, she did actually want a drink and the added bonus of drinking is that she didn’t have to wear her mask, so she took her time sipping it rather than downing the water.

And who did we see in reception checking in? The other family from the train of course, we knew that the bus didn’t really save you much time, but as we had loitered in the village I thought they would have more of a head start on us.

Checking in only took a few minutes and we had been allocated a room in block 46 which was close to the hotel facilities.

We went round and round in circles trying to find our hotel room though, we found the block easily enough but couldn’t find the actual room. The signs were pretty confusing. Eventually we found it. Room 131.

First off I had to take a bunch of photos, it was a cute room, Cars themed as you can see.

We were now quite hot and so we stripped off to our undies, had a quick shower and unpacked. I also wanted to clean the surfaces in our room. So, I got my trusty disinfectant wipes out and cleaned the bedside table, phone, remote control, drawer handles, surfaces, bathroom…Kate told me not to worry. I put the wipes in our park bag with the intention of using them to wipe every table and chair before eating in the parks, but actually they were all really clean and we saw cast members cleaning tables as soon as other guests left so I didn’t feel like I needed to use them at all in the parks.

Kate checked out the TV and found the Disney Channel and Hey Jessie was on. Ah, now this feels like a Disney holiday she doesn’t watch the Disney Channel at home. She explained that this was the only channel in English other than the news.

I looked at the wait times and saw that most rides were under 30 minutes and so we didn’t feel like we needed to rush.

In the end we stopped in the room for about an hour and at around 4pm we decided to go and get the bus to the parks as we were feeling lazy and it was very hot.

There was one other family waiting at the bus stop and we got really lucky as the bus came in 3 minutes after we arrived.

The bus had red crosses on seats to promote social distancing but of course with only a small number of people getting on the bus it really wasn’t a problem.

We soon arrived at the bus station and went through bag check.

I asked Kate which park she wanted to start off with and she chose correctly! Disneyland Park of course, I was pretty happy now as I couldn’t wait to walk up Main Street. She said she wanted this park as it’s like Magic Kingdom.

Ahh, the site of the Disneyland Hotel was something to behold.

It really is so pretty. We both agreed that one day we would stay there and have a park view room.

Again we took lots of photos.

It was just lovely to hear the music and slowly stroll in. The music for Be Our Guest was playing. It was just perfect.

The turnstiles have lots of space markers on the floor to make sure everyone is spread out and there is a cast member ready to scan your park reservation for those people who needed to make a reservation.

We chose lane number 6 as it’s Kate’s lucky number. There wasn’t a queue to get in at this time of day.

We took our time with the walk up Main Street and I surprised myself with no tears, I was just beaming.

It’s so hard to explain how good it felt to be there.

We didn’t rush, we took our time, we knew we didn’t need to hurry as there weren’t going to be any long waits.

Kate picked the rides and she made a great choice for our first ride – Phantom Manor.

We didn’t get to ride this on our last trip as it was under refurbishment but we made up for that this time around. We took the turning into Frontierland and turned left to head to Phantom Manor.

The wait time was posted as 20 minutes and it was pretty accurate. Fortunately the queue line was under the shade as we were feeling hot. It was a forecast high of 36 and it really truly felt like it was 36.

We were so pleased that they did the stretching room too. They had markers on the floor for each group to stand inside and so it was easy to keep a distance from other guests. We were both blown away by how great the ride was and that we got to have the full experience too.

We loved it. When we came off Kate suggested we do Big Thunder, but we couldn’t see any trains on the track and when we checked it had gone down, but the app said it would be re-opening soon. So, we wandered over to Indiana Jones. The app said it was a 15 minute wait, but this was a massive over estimate as it was less than 5 minutes.

I love the queue line here and took lots of photos.

Kate reminded me to keep my head back in the seat, I did close my eyes a few times, but it was a fun ride.

We were both feeling peckish and had a look around for food, but it was at this point that we realised that many of the snack bars and quick service restaurants in the park closed at 5pm, which was a bit of a pain. Poor planning to blame here!

We went over to Fantasyland and spotted that the Tea Cups only had a 5 minute wait so we hopped on there for a spin.

Next up was Snow White, which had a posted wait time of 10 minutes, but ended up being less.

While in the queue for Snow White we spotted on the app that the Café Hyperion was open for food still and we fancied looking around Discoveryland so that’s where we headed next.

We spotted that Hyperspace Mountain was posted as a 15 minute wait and we decided it would be rude not to ride!

It was an accurate posted wait time, we love this ride. It is much better than Space Mountain in WDW. It’s just great.

Next up was food, we couldn’t wait any longer. It was about 6.30pm and we went to Café Hyperion.

I had the fish sandwich meal. It was ok.

Kate had a BB8 burger meal which came with a BB8 cake which had a strawberry mouse inside, we shared this half each.

We took our time with the food as it was nice to be sitting down in the cool with our masks off. While we didn’t find it a problem wearing the masks, it was good to have a break from them.

I had a scroll through the app and saw that Pirates of the Caribbean had a wait of 10 minutes. This was one that we had only done once on our previous trip as the wait time had been looonnng. Not this trip! We did it way more than just once. In the end there was no queue at all. We just strolled through the line and straight to the boats. We both ended up with a damp bottom, but that was it.

We decided to give BTMR a try next. There were no people around now at all.

When we got to the ride it was posted as 20 minutes, but as it was now 7.45pm I suggested to Kate this was probably inflated, it was but only by 5 minutes and so Big Thunder was our last ride of the night.

What a great ride to end on, again this is a much better ride than the BTMR at WDW.

I tried to take a photo of the Perspex screens that had been put up in the queue to give you an idea of how the lines were kept separate.

There will be better photos as we go on that show how the lines are separated as you snake through. The markers were all over the floor to remind guests to stay away from the group in front.

And then it was time to leave the park. We walked over to the hub. I love the castle in the twilight, so beautiful.

It’s a shame that we weren’t able to be in the parks while it was dark as Disneyland Park closes at 8pm and Studios at 7pm as the parks are so beautiful at night, but nevermind that couldn’t be helped.

We strolled down Main Street and took a look in the bakery and sweet shop on the way out. Kate spotted the marshmallows and vowed to buy some later in the trip.

At the station waving us good-bye were Mickey and Minnie, Geppetto and Pinocchio, Rafiki and Timon.

This looks busy, compared to the rest of the park, and I guess there are a lot of people, but it was spread out and there was space in between each group to walk through. I suspect that this would feel too crowded for some people at the moment, but we were ok with it. Most of the crowd were just pausing for a few seconds to wave and say good-bye.

On the walk back through the Village Kate spotted a pretzel stand and bought a pretzel with melted cheese, it was lovely and warm and she ate it while sitting on the wall outside Planet Hollywood.

Back in the room we phoned home and spoke to Dave about all the fun we had today. Kate watched more of the Disney channel and we looked up options for places to eat so that we wouldn’t get caught out again tomorrow. In the end we didn’t go to bed until just around midnight. It was a long but happy day.

We felt like we had a fab evening in the parks, we’d been there around 3 and half hours, done 7 attractions and eaten a leisurely dinner. What a great start!

Attractions: 7
Step Count: 23,260

Next up tomorrow, Day 2, we head to Studios during Extra Magic Time to try and ride Crush and Tower of Terror. Then we park hop to Disneyland for more fun.

[Buggles94]

Yay - a TR so I can get my Disney magic through the Dibb again Sounds like a fab travel day and looks so quiet - no issue with social distancing! You definitely made the most of day 1. Love the rides you chose especially Phantom Manor. Can't wait for the next instalment...

[MrsSilverStar]

what an amazing first day! Sounds like you had a great time.

I must admit, it made me a bit sad seeing the characters waving from afar - I think it's great all the safety measures are in place but it just reminds how much things have changed

You're making me want to go back though so I can't be that upset!

[mrsdjh]

I cant believe how little luggage you took! The train was nice and empty and it sounds like its an easy journey on the Eurostar.

I can imagine how good it felt to be there. It looks so quiet and you got a lot of rides done in a short space of time. Its lovely to read a trip report - even one with masks and social distancing!

[Goldia]

Originally Posted by Buggles94

Yay - a TR so I can get my Disney magic through the Dibb again Sounds like a fab travel day and looks so quiet - no issue with social distancing! You definitely made the most of day 1. Love the rides you chose especially Phantom Manor. Can't wait for the next instalment...

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Yes I was really pleased the trains were so quiet. We'd not used public transport at all in lockdown and so this was my first time on a train in months. I feared that it would be busy as we were going at prime travel to London commuter time, but I guess everyone is still working from home. I would have been happy to stop after riding Phantom Manor, I was so impressed and happy to have done it, I wouldn't have minded if that was all we did on day 1. We decided we didn't need to worry if a ride had a long wait as we knew we still had the rest of the trip so we just wandered about and if we came across something that was a short wait we went for it and it was good to walk around the park and get a feel for it all.

Originally Posted by MrsSilverStar

what an amazing first day! Sounds like you had a great time.

I must admit, it made me a bit sad seeing the characters waving from afar - I think it's great all the safety measures are in place but it just reminds how much things have changed

You're making me want to go back though so I can't be that upset!

See more...

Yes the characters waving from a distance was a bit sad really. They've put together selfie spots with them, which you will see in the next few days, I kept asking Kate if she wanted to meet any of them but she really wasn't fussed about it.

Originally Posted by mrsdjh

I cant believe how little luggage you took! The train was nice and empty and it sounds like its an easy journey on the Eurostar.

I can imagine how good it felt to be there. It looks so quiet and you got a lot of rides done in a short space of time. Its lovely to read a trip report - even one with masks and social distancing!

See more...

I know we did pack light. I didnt bother taking my make up as I figured most of my face would be under a mask or under sunglasses and so there didn't seem any point in packing it. The direct train is supposed to take 2 hours 45 minutes from St Pancras to DLP, but with it skipping 2 stops it was actually only 2h20 so very speedy. The parks were busier after lunch in the afternoon, but we had a break every day at that point and by the time we went back at about 5pm there were droves of people leaving, it always feels good to be the ones going in when the parks are emptying out. I think because we had a relatively long trip we didn't feel we needed to cram everything in each day and we could afford a break at the hottest and busiest times.

[jothp]

What a great first day. I just love the castle at DLP and find it so much prettier than the one at WDW. It looks like it wasn't too busy at all with plenty of space to distance from other people.
Somehow we always find that Phantom Manor is spookier than Haunted Mansion. I think it's something to do with not being able to understand the commentary.

[Rac20]

What a great start. I got a bit emotional reading your post. 🥰 I can’t wait until I am able to walk up Main Street again.💗

[Cutiepie]

Wow, what a great first day glad it all went smoothly. I’m beginning to wish I had thought of it for Keira & I.

Looking forward to the next instalment

[Fuellady]

Glad the travelling all went smoothly for you. Lovely first day - I can’t quite believe how much you fitted into the first evening, it feels like reading a full day’s worth of attractions!

I can feel your new love for DLP already in your writing, especially as you were arriving and walking to the hotel.

[Goldia]

Originally Posted by jothp

What a great first day. I just love the castle at DLP and find it so much prettier than the one at WDW. It looks like it wasn't too busy at all with plenty of space to distance from other people.
Somehow we always find that Phantom Manor is spookier than Haunted Mansion. I think it's something to do with not being able to understand the commentary.

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It is a beautiful castle, we like the cube shaped trees just like in the movie. There were times when it was busy, well busier, but there was always plenty of space. We liked that the commentary was in a mix of both languages especially Madame Leota, she was fab.

Originally Posted by Rac20

What a great start. I got a bit emotional reading your post. 🥰 I can’t wait until I am able to walk up Main Street again.💗

See more...

There's no other place like it, walking up Main Street was just aaahhh.

Originally Posted by Cutiepie

Wow, what a great first day glad it all went smoothly. I’m beginning to wish I had thought of it for Keira & I.

Looking forward to the next instalment

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It was a relief to get on the Eurostar without any problems. The evening in the park was perfect just doing a few rides in each land was such a good idea as it gave us the chance to look around properly and remind ourselves of the layout of the park.

Originally Posted by Fuellady

Glad the travelling all went smoothly for you. Lovely first day - I can’t quite believe how much you fitted into the first evening, it feels like reading a full day’s worth of attractions!

I can feel your new love for DLP already in your writing, especially as you were arriving and walking to the hotel.

See more...

When I added it up I had to double check, it felt like a full day. We had already decided we would take a break in the afternoon when the heat started to get to us but this evening confirmed that it was the right plan as we would easily be able to get to do all the attractions and multiple times so we wouldn't feel like we were missing out.

I really like the walk through the village to the hotels the other side it was perfect for us. It meant we weren't reliant on buses or trains or uber. Of course onsite is more expensive.