How to Read the Posts

 Hi friends!

I wanted to let everyone know that the top post in this blog is not necessarily the most recent. :D I found a way to edit the "published" date to be the date the events actually happened. The blog sorts everything on the main page in order of the published date, though...so watch out!

If you just want to read about the time in Europe, start here:

https://wherewillthisgofromhere.blogspot.com/2022/06/here-we-gooooo.html

If you want to read everything from the beginning of time, start here:

https://wherewillthisgofromhere.blogspot.com/2022/03/t-minus-78-days.html

(click "Newer Post" at the end of each post). 

I hate that I can't re-order the default. :( Sorry! 

Getting Overseas

 Well, we are back!! And I am now writing this blog in the past tense, today's post more than 3 weeks after it actually happened. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago, and yet at the same time it also feels like a different lifetime. 

Over the next few days, I plan to add posts for each day, each adventure, bit by bit. I probably will also come back to posts to add more details as I remember them, or add stories from my family members' perspectives. We took thousands of pictures, and I am struggling to figure out how to include those in my posts, so please be patient as I figure this out and as my "style" changes from post to post!

I also realized that I can change the "published" date on posts, so while this post is indeed written in July, all following posts will appear to be published in the past - on the day they happened. oooooo...it's like a time-traveling blog, now! 

And now, on to the juicy details!

Phase 1 - Getting Overseas

Our family had never flown anywhere other than Orlando, Florida before. (I personally have flown many times between the US and Canada and many destinations within the US, as well as one trip to Belgium about 12 years ago. My husband also has many flight hours under his belt, but not within the last 20 years). There was not a small amount of anxiety going around between the four of us, what with Covid testing requirements, airport changes since 911 and Covid, and the additional layers of Customs and Immigration controls to pass through. Curt and I did a lot of pre-reading about airport procedures, as well as people's recent travel experiences through Newark, Heathrow, and Charles De-Gaulle airports. We felt as prepared as possible, and also agreed as a family that each and every "hiccup" would be met with as much humor and "que sera, sera" attitude as we could muster. 

A few days before our trip, the US removed the requirement for a negative Covid rapid test result to return home. I was thrilled! We now have over 15 "wasted" home tests sitting here, but at least that saved a massive amount of space in our baggage! It also relieved any need for a "Plan B" to get stuck in France should any of us have tested Positive before coming home.
I started obsessively checking the United app about 3 days before departure, feeling better each time I saw the green "On Time" bubble. At the 24-hour mark, I checked in for our flight. I'm so glad I did, because the afore-mentioned change in the Covid testing rules had wiped out all the prior paperwork I had already completed! After another half-hour of uploading Passport info for everyone, and signing all the e-documents, we had our electronic boarding passes and checked in our luggage. This put us in the "fast lane" for check-in at the airport, but we had no idea what that meant. LOL! The app just said to "look for the purple signs".

On June 15th, we finished all the packing, cleaned the house, said goodbye to the pets, and waited.

Bags ready to go, with cat saying "What's up?"

Ann picked us up from the house around 2pm, with plans to be at the airport by 4, which was 3 hours before departure time. We had no traffic delays, arrived at the airport on time, and waved goodbye to our sister-slash-Disney-travel-agent.  As we walked into the airport, we easily found the "big purple sign" for dropping off our pre-checked luggage (at the exact opposite end of the terminal from where we were - of course!) and hiked ourselves on over there. Less than 5 minutes later, we were done and on our way through security. With our Nexus clearance, we have TSA Pre-Check, and were through security in a matter of just a few moments, too. After we made the long walk to our gate, we had over 2 hours to kill before boarding! Well...we always say we'd rather wait at the airport than miss our flight!

We spent a few minutes wandering around the airport, trying to figure out how the tablets were used to order food, and finally found a table and got some dinner and drinks. We then planted our butts in some waiting chairs, and killed time. Boarding was mostly smooth, but some confused passengers caused us to have a delay in getting off the ground. I attempted a family selfie on the plane, with minimal success. 

Dinner was served on the plane - an Indian spiced chicken dish that no one in my family particularly enjoyed. 

I was glad we'd eaten already, but I also knew this would be just the first of many times my kids would eat just barely enough to survive. After the food was collected, it was "lights out" time. The plan was to sleep on the plane, as much as possible. I don't think any of us got more than a few minutes of a light doze, despite our best attempts to find a comfortable position. We at least had these cool panels in the seats to watch movies, listen to music, and track our flight progress:

Six and a half hours into the flight, we just gave up on trying to sleep, and ate the provided breakfast, hoping the coffee would fuel us through the rest of the day. A few minutes later, we got the announcement that we were landing, and I peeked out of the window to see London below us! 

There it was - the Thames river! Famous bridges and buildings I had only seen in movies or pictures! Familiar and yet entirely new to my eyes! I don't know how everyone else felt, but at this precise moment, I nearly cried at the realization that everything I had only believed was a fairytale fantasy was in fact real and was actually happening to me. 

Getting home and some final thoughts

 Our trip home was delightfully, pleasantly uneventful.  We had hired "Paris Chauffeurs" for a private car from the hotel to the airport. They were responsive via email, helpful on planning the best pickup time, prompt, courteous and so helpful that the driver even walked us into the airport and up to our airline gate for us! We were early, but there was still a huge line...but while we waited, I realized there was a separate line for those who were only doing baggage dropoff. Of course I had checked-in the day before, and had our boarding passes downloaded, so I was pretty sure we qualified to be in that shorter line. We took the chance and hopped over there, and luckily I was right. We were done in about 15 minutes after the check-in desks opened for the day.

We stopped at a McDonald's for drinks (first coffee of the day) before going through security. Security lines were short, too, and we were at our gate about 2 hours early. We ate breakfast, going to the Starbucks a couple of times because the girls found out they had pancakes and muffins, and of course Curt and I needed more caffeine.

As we boarded the plane, I handed off the gifts for the flight attendants again. N and I had made little goodie-bags each with a $5 Starbucks gift card, a "Thank you!" note printed out by N, and some local chocolates. On the trip to Europe, we had stuffed Hershey Kisses in the baggies, and on the way home we bought Lindt chocolates for this purpose. On both flights, we were thanked personally by every single flight attendant on board. This trip, they went a bit extra, and we were given the same gift that the First Class passengers got, and a hand-written thank you note! 

The kit has socks, an eye mask, ear buds, a pen, a face cleansing cloth, tissues and a toothbrush and toothpaste, all in a hard-shell case. We were chuffed that the little tokens were received so well...made it totally worth carrying those baggies all over Europe with us!

The rest of the flight home was about the same as the flight out...we all watched movies, took short but useless naps, got a couple of meals/snacks that no one really enjoyed, and landed safely.

We had originally hired another private car to get us home from Newark, but a few days earlier we got an offer from Curt's sister to pick us up. Everyone agreed we were tired of being driven around by strangers, so we took her up on that. She met us at the airport and we got to talk all about the trip the whole way home.

We got home to find both pets alive and well, the house clean, our bedsheets washed and the dishes done....what a great house-sitter! 

I may write more about this trip later, but for now, this is the end. It is actually Aug 6th, 2022 today - a month since we arrived home - and I am still beyond ecstatic that we had this adventure. I really feel like words are inadequate, but I sincerely hope I've managed to capture the feelings and memories so that when I read this again in a few years, it will all come back. 

When I named this blog "Where Will This Go From Here?" I was honestly not sure what this trip would do to my family. It was 50/50 whether it would be a disaster or a success. I can happily say that we are looking forward to our NEXT trip to Europe...we are just having such a hard time deciding where to go!! 💖💖😂

Final Day in Disneyland

 For our final day of the trip, we were in "easy mode". We started off by rope dropping the big rides in Studios before the lines got crazy. N, S and I rode Crush's Coaster.

View from the line

Then S waited with Curt while N did Tower of Terror again with me this time.

It looks so serene from the outside...

For lunch, we wandered over to Disneyland to eat at Walt's. On the way in, N saw one of her favorite characters, so we stood in line for Winnie the Pooh (and got to see the parade again from the line).

Lunch was incredible...this restaurant is worth all the hype! The décor was stunning, the food delicious, the service impeccable. What a great memory!

This time S got the signature dessert

Curt now had to do the "back to the room to rest" thing, so the girls and I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon riding more rides, including the horrible Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril (ohhh, so rough!!) which was S's first loop-de-loop coaster! 

We finally rode everything the park had to offer, and S wanted very much to do Big Thunder one last time. As we got there, we discovered the ride had e-stopped and was being evacuated. We hung around for a few minutes to see if this would be a quick restart, but it looked like it was unlikely, so we headed back to the hotel for some time at the pool before dinner.

I can see our room!

Once we had enough pool time, we went back to the room to pack, and then walked across the "lagoon" to the New York Hotel. This had just recently been re-themed to the Avengers, and was all modern and sleek. Not my favorite style to stay in, but really fun to visit.

Hallway to the restaurant

Dinner was buffet style with Italian, American, and Chinese food offerings. The kids were *finally* able to eat their fill, and N made it her goal to eat every single dessert offering available. She succeeded! Perhaps to her regret for a while afterwards. 😜

This was only plate 1 of 3...

After dinner, I checked the app and saw that Big Thunder had re-opened. N offered to take her sister over for one more ride. I would've joined them if my feet weren't hurting so much, but I also thought it was a great opportunity for them to spend some sister-time together. So, off they went while Curt and I went back to the lounge for another drink before finishing the packing, and confirming our driver's arrival time for the morning.

We didn't take many pictures this day, but the rest are here:  https://link.shutterfly.com/99aLje0tdsb

Paris

 Today's plan:

• take the train from DLP to Paris
• Get on the "Hop On Hop Off" bus tour of the city, hopping off whenever we felt like it, probably more than once
• hang out by the Eiffel tower and eat dinner
• Take the last (10pm) boat tour on the Seine to see the tower "sparkle" at night
• get a cab back to the train station (HOHO bus would be finished running by then)
• train back to DLP

I had pre-purchased the HOHO bus and boat tour tickets as a bundled package. These are good for 24 hours, starting whenever you get on the first bus. I wasn't too stressed about getting to the city too early, since the bus tours didn't start until 9am and wouldn't even make it to the stop we were going to start at until 9:30.

What actually happened:

We all "slept in" a bit, and after some breakfast, Curt and S felt slightly more enthusiastic about going today than they had last night. I was thrilled that we would still be adventuring as a family instead of splitting up, but I was honestly okay if it had worked out the other way. This vacation was all about everyone enjoying themselves!

The same train station right outside of DLP also connected to the RER line - a public transportation train that would take us right to the heart of Paris. The stop closest to one of the HOHO bus stops was Auber, right outside of the Opera Garnier, and would take us about an hour.

We walked through Disney Village and out to the train station. We found the ticket kiosks and got a book of 10 tickets, which seemed to be cheaper than 8 one-way tickets. We quickly figured out the system for getting through the gates, and found the train we wanted. These were double-decker trains, and we chose a bottom level seat for the ride out.

We arrived in Auber and easily found our way up the eleventy-thousand sets of stairs to the surface street. We took our bearings, so we'd remember how to get back, and then located the HOHO bus stop. The bus arrived just a few minutes later, and we found room on the top deck (hooray!) and got our earbuds (much more comfortable than we expected) plugged into the audio tour and off we went! 

Our tour around the city was informative and lovely. We were impressed by how BIG the Arc de Triumph is. And seeing Notre Dame, even in it's burned-out-in-repair state was still impressive and glorious.

At one point we passed a museum that almost had interest for us to go visit...and then we were informed (in my case reminded) that the first Sunday of every month is free entrance to all the city's museums. And then we realized it was the first Sunday of the month...and then we turned the corner and saw the line to get in...and we'd noped the heck outta that.

All those people are just waiting to get in

We hopped off the bus at the Eiffel Tower stop. We walked aimlessly, looking around and avoiding the pickpockets, gypsies, an other unsavory folks. We were trying mostly to find a bathroom and somewhere to eat, and eventually found both! I got to finally eat escargot in France! (To be clear, this is a treat my family used to have at least once a year, usually more often. It used to be on several restaurant's menus in Toronto, as an appetizer, and I would always order it when I could. I'm not unfamiliar with it, but it is really hard to find in Pennsylvania!) 

After a lovely lunch, we wandered back towards the bus stop, and of course rode the carousel (my main goal) and stopped to lie on the grass and enjoy the view (N's main goal). 

As a whole, we were utterly exhausted, and elected to skip the 1-hour boat tour...which would have just been a repeat of all the sights we'd already seen, just from the water instead of the road. There was no way anyone was comfortable staying out until after dark, now that we'd experienced what 11pm was like, and knew it wasn't even going to be full dark until closer to midnight (and then we'd have over an hour of travel back to the hotel).

So, when we agreed we'd had our fill of Paris - at least enough to say we'd been - we got back on the HOHO bus and returned to our starting point. We easily reversed the process to get back to the hotel, and ironically decided to have the most American of dinners - McDonald's at Disney Village.  I had kept hearing rumors that the European version of McDonald's was so much better than ours, and I can say that in my opinion those rumors are completely false. 😝

After dinner, it was still early enough to catch a few more rides at Disneyland - it's convenient when it's open til 11pm! We rode Phantom Manor (again), walked through the castle tour, and shopped for souvenirs. I finally found my themed pin!! (I have a pin with the year on it from every trip we've done since 2010). We had to go to the resort gift shop, not the parks, but finally found it. N got a hoody, S got a pin for her new favorite ride - Big Thunder Mountain, and Curt couldn't find a darn thing he liked.

To round out the evening, the girls retired to the room to watch TV, and Curt and I enjoyed a few cocktails in the hotel lounge...one of our favorite vacation activities. 

Overall, we agreed that of all the places we had seen on this trip, Paris did not live up to it's reputation of "the most beautiful city in the world". Maybe we saw the wrong places? We loved more cities in Scotland and England, and the countryside in Ireland. But we are all so glad we went, and that's the whole point!

All our gazillion pictures (Curt took several of everything, and I couldn't choose what to keep, so they're all here!): https://link.shutterfly.com/ayvxbN1Obsb

Disneyland Paris Day 2

 How do I write a post about a day at a theme park? We spent the whole day at a theme park! I am not sure how this compares to the past 2 weeks of seeing history and amazing architecture and culture and getting all that travel experience. The one thing I knew would happen, and I was right, was that we were so happy to be "in the Disney bubble" for the day. We had no concerns about anything, felt like we knew where we were and what was going on. It didn't even feel like we weren't in the USA most of the time...I constantly had to remind myself we were in France!

We had breakfast at the hotel - a bit later than we meant to, but nothing serious. We went straight from there to the Walt Disney Studios Park. We realized that rides open and closed in staggered hours - meaning that not everything opened at park opening time, and things closed before park closing time. So, what we ended up doing early and late in the day had a lot to do with what was open!

We started with Stitch Live! - all loved it, a very adorable interactive show, much like Turtle Talk with Crush. (Yes, I'm going to compare things to WDW, which I've been to 10 times so that's our "baseline"!)

We saw information that the new Marvel campus was going to possibly have a "soft opening" while we were there, so we checked that - but all the construction walls were still up, so we were disappointed there.

Curt always called N his "Boo", from Monster's Inc.

Next was Cars Road Trip,  which was a different theme of the old Backlot Tour at Disney's Hollywood Studios. 

We stayed in World of Pixar (Toy Story land), and rode the Slinky Dog Zigzag Spin, which is basically a Musical Express ride.

Then we waited in far too long a line to ride "Cars Quatre Roues Rallye", which is a short "Alien Saucer Swirl" style ride that does NOT warrant an hour wait. By the end of this, Curt and I were developing headaches, though we weren't sure why. (We were hydrating and eating...maybe it was just the increase in temps). 

We had lunch reservations in the other park, so we made our way over there and it took us less time than we thought. So we did our next "must see" attraction, and visited the dragon under the castle - by far the COOLEST thing to see there!!

Then it was time for our lunch reservations at Auberge de Cendrillon. We walked in and realized that the Princesses were back! (Somehow I had no idea that this had happened between when I booked it and when we got there). We all got pictures with Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora and Minnie Mouse.

Sadly, my headache turned into a migraine as we waited for our food to be served, and when the main course arrived, I was suffering pretty badly and the food was threatening to make me very ill and possibly embarrass myself. I tried cool water on my face in the bathroom, but that didn't work. Finally I had to give up and just get somewhere dark where I could lie down. I asked my wonderful husband to finish the meal without me, and he explained to the waiter what happened. They managed to get my meal and dessert all packaged up for me and brought it back to the hotel room. After they finished eating, N went back to the Studios park to ride some things on her own, while Curt and S came to check on me, bring me my food, and wait for me to recover.

Curt's fancy dessert!

N rode the rest of the rides in the Pixar land - the RC Racer and Ratatouille (which she said kept breaking down but was otherwise identical to the WDW version we'd rode in March and hadn't really enjoyed all that much). She then got to ride her favorite, Tower of Terror.  By the time she did all of that and was heading back to the hotel, I was recovered and ready to get back out again.

I really wanted a picture next to this, but was in so much pain I just snapped the shot I could get as I went by on my way back to the hotel.

We went back to the parks and kept it a bit low-key for a while, riding the Disney Railroad all the way around the park. 

We then again made our way back through Adventureland and rode Pirates a second time (we love it that much!) right before having dinner at Captain Jack's restaurant, which has the ride right through it! We decided to play around with the dining plan a bit here, and shared a variety of dishes so we all got a taste of something interesting. We really loved the ambiance in here, and would totally go back when we were perhaps more hungry...doing this meal less than 4 hours after our big lunch was not good planning, it turned out. 

The rest of the night was spent exploring things before they closed: we did Alice in Wonderland's labyrinth:

then rode the Casey Jr train and "Le Pays des Contes de Fees", a delightful boat ride with adorable models of famous Disney movies and fairytales. These all have no equivalent at WDW and were just delightful!

From there, we wandered back to Discoveryland (where Hyperspace Mountain is) to check out Star Tours, which was basically another identical ride to the one in Florida.

We may have done a couple more things, but we don't remember now and we decided that it wasn't worth it to stay for the fireworks a second time. We made it back to the hotel and actually watched the fireworks from our balcony.

The plan was to go to the city of Paris the next day, but Curt and S were very hesitant about leaving the Disney bubble and going to see even more of what we'd done for 2 weeks already. I admit, I was really leaning their way, but also strongly felt that we couldn't be this close and NOT go. N was definitely wanting to go see the Eiffel Tower. We went to bed agreeing to "see how we feel after a night of sleep".

All the pictures, so many pictures! https://link.shutterfly.com/JanCN1CA9rb