Three Days at Disneyland Paris

After my solo afternoon chasing coasters at Parc Astérix, the real family trip started the way most people's Disneyland Paris trip starts: on a train.

We caught the OUIGO out of the airport and rode it to Marne-la-Vallée–Chessy, the station that sits practically on Disneyland Paris's doorstep — you step off the platform and you're a short walk or a free shuttle ride from the hotels and the parks. We grabbed the shuttle to the Sequoia Lodge, dropped our bags, and did what you have to do at least once on a Disney trip: walked over to the park entrance just to stand there and look at it. Sleeping Beauty Castle — Le Château de la Belle au Bois Dormant — anchoring the far end of Main Street, and it really is beautiful. Of all the Disney castles, this is the one the designers were allowed to make the most fairy-tale, the most stylized and pink-and-gold and storybook, precisely because it didn't have to look like anything real. We took our photos. We were properly here now, all three of us, and we had three days and two parks in front of us.

I'll say up front what this post is going to keep circling back to: Disneyland Paris is probably not the best of the Disney resorts, and the two parks have some rough edges. But it's still a genuinely great pair of parks, with a handful of attractions that flat-out beat their American cousins, and we had a wonderful three days. Both things are true.

Day One: Disneyland Park

We spent our first afternoon in Disneyland Park, the original of the two — the castle park — and started where I always seem to start, in Discoveryland.

Discoveryland is Paris's version of Tomorrowland, except instead of a generic space-age future it leans into a bronze-and-brass Jules Verne, retro-futurist aesthetic that's genuinely one of the best-looking areas in any Disney park. The headliner here is the coaster, and it's a strange and wonderful one. Hyperspace Mountain is Paris's Space Mountain, but it has never been an ordinary Space Mountain. When it opened in 1995 it was built as a genuinely aggressive launched coaster — a catapult launch straight up the outside of the dome and three actual inversions inside, things no other Space Mountain has ever had. Since 2017 it's worn a Star Wars overlay, with the whole indoor experience redressed as a space battle. I rode it solo through the single-rider line, and I'll be honest: it's starting to show its age. A touch rough now, though nothing horrible, and the Star Wars synchronization of lights and effects reminded me a lot of the Guardians of the Galaxy coaster at EPCOT. Still a unique ride, and still the most intense "mountain" Disney has ever built.

Preston and I did Star Tours together next. It's the familiar motion-simulator flight through the Star Wars universe you'll find at the other Disney parks, but the Paris version kept bouncing back and forth between English and French, which was a little disorienting — neither of us could quite remember whether we'd seen the particular sequence it served up, and we spent a good while afterward trying to reconstruct which random segments we'd gotten at which parks over the years. A good problem to have, I suppose.

Then the whole family piled into It's a Small World, which was a total walk-on. Paris's version is a good one — better than the Florida edition, I thought, though maybe a step short of the original in California, which is the one all the others are measured against.

By then we were hungry, so we stopped at Pizzeria Bella Notte in Fantasyland, the Lady and the Tramp–themed spot. Nothing earth-shaking, but honestly better than the pizza at the U.S. parks, and that turned out to be a running theme of the whole trip. In general the food at the European Disney parks runs a notch above what you get stateside, and there's markedly less disposable junk involved — expect real cups and real plates, and expect to sort and separate your dishes into the proper bins when you bus your own table on the way out. It's a small thing, but it makes the whole experience feel a little less like eating off a conveyor belt.

We kept working through Fantasyland after lunch. We floated through Le Pays des Contes de Fées, the Storybook Land canal boats that drift past beautifully built miniatures of scenes from the animated films, and rode Casey Jr. – le Petit Train du Cirque, the little circus-train coaster that runs right alongside those same miniatures. Preston steered us over to Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast, one of his longtime favorites — the interactive shooter where you rack up points blasting targets — and, as usual, he beat all of our scores without much apparent effort.

Not everything cooperated. We'd wanted to do the Cheshire Cat hedge maze — Alice's Curious Labyrinth — but it was closed, and it never did reopen for the rest of our stay. Pirates of the Caribbean was down for a refurbishment too, though the good news there was that it was scheduled to reopen on our last day, so we filed it away as unfinished business.

The nice surprise of the afternoon was just wandering. We spent a while getting lost around Adventure Isle and Pirate Beach — the rockwork, the caves, the swinging bridges, Skull Rock — and it reminded me how much better these parks are when they give you places to explore rather than just lines to stand in. That kind of walk-around-and-discover space is something Paris does especially well, and something the newer parks too often skip.

I did sneak off to ride one more coaster: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril, over in Adventureland. This one barely feels like it belongs at a Disney park. The queue and the surrounding theming are absolutely up to the Disney standard, but the ride itself — an early-'90s looping coaster — is dated, worn, and horribly rough for a place like this. It's a coaster, so I have to ride it, but it is not anyone's idea of a good one.

Big Thunder Mountain was running hot and cold all day, so we decided to save it for later in the trip and drifted back toward Fantasyland to close out the afternoon with a couple of classic dark rides — Les Voyages de Pinocchio and Peter Pan's Flight — before heading out of the park entirely for dinner at the Rainforest Cafe in Disney Village, the resort's dining-and-shopping promenade.

And then we went back to the room, which is where the day lost a little air. We were all a bit underwhelmed by the Sequoia Lodge. It's marketed as a "Moderate" resort, themed to a grand American national-park lodge, and the public spaces and amenities all seemed perfectly fine — on the level, as you'd expect. But the room was easily the worst of our whole trip. It was warm after a long hot day and never really cooled off, the mattresses were stiff and uncomfortable, and the whole space felt worn and small. I know European hotel standards run a little different from what we're used to in the States, and I try to keep that in mind, but this wasn't what we'd expect from a Disney "Moderate." We had three nights booked, so we made our peace with it. You deal.

Day Two: A first look at Disney Adventure World

We slept in a little on our second morning — an easy start earned by the day before — and eased into things with lunch at the Five Guys in Disney Village before heading over to the second gate, which is where this trip got interesting from a theme-park-nerd perspective.

Here's the background worth knowing. The second park opened in 2002 as the Walt Disney Studios Park, and for two decades it had a reputation as the park nobody was excited about — a half-day afterthought you dragged yourself through so you could say you'd done it, thin on attractions and thinner on charm. Disney knew it, and poured an enormous, years-long investment into fixing it. Avengers Campus arrived in 2022. And then, on March 29, 2026 — barely three months before we showed up — the whole thing was reborn as Disney Adventure World, one of the most ambitious expansions in the resort's history.

The centerpiece of that relaunch is a brand-new 7.5-acre central lake called Adventure Bay, ringed by a new promenade, and beyond it a whole new World of Frozen land built around a 118-foot recreation of the North Mountain with Elsa's ice palace perched on it. There's a new Tangled-themed family spinner, Raiponce Tangled Spin, and a new nighttime drone-and-water show over the bay. In other words, we caught this park at the exact moment it stopped being the one everyone dragged to and started being a park you could genuinely spend a full day in. More on Frozen tomorrow, because that's when we actually rode it.

This first visit we kept things light. We walked up to the front of the park and caught Stitch Live!, the interactive show where an animated Stitch talks and jokes with the audience in real time — it's the same idea as Turtle Talk with Crush at EPCOT. It was cute, and, more to the point that week, it was air-conditioned. Europe was in the middle of a serious heatwave for most of our trip, and a cool, dark theater doing a twenty-minute bit with a cartoon alien was exactly what we needed.

The one real ride we did here today was Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure in Avengers Campus, where we waited about fifty minutes in the standby line. It's an interesting one — very heavy on screens, an interactive game in the same family as Toy Story Mania, except there's no blaster in your hands. Instead you fling web by making throwing gestures with your arms, and you score points for "grabbing" things with your web-slingers. Novel, and Preston loved it, though after fifty minutes in line I'd have wanted a bit more ride for the wait.

We poked around the rest of the park, grabbed some snacks, and left it there — no other rides at Adventure World this day. We hopped back over to Disneyland Park to fill in some gaps.

First up was Phantom Manor, which was close to a walk-on. This is Paris's take on the Haunted Mansion, and it's not a straight clone — it's darker and more coherent, set in a decaying Gold Rush–era mansion overlooking Frontierland, with a genuine narrative about a jilted bride and a cursed family. Catrina didn't love it as much as the Haunted Mansions back home, but I found the reworked theme and story genuinely interesting; it commits to being a real ghost story in a way the American versions don't quite.

Dinner was at the Silver Spur Steakhouse in Frontierland. Nothing earth-shaking — a decent meal. For a steakhouse the steak was fine but nothing to write home about. Service in Europe is a different animal from what Americans are conditioned to expect — less doting, more straightforwardly transactional — and honestly I've come to appreciate the simplicity of it. Nobody's performing for a tip; they bring you your food, and they leave you alone.

We closed the night with the ride Preston had been waiting for: Big Thunder Mountain. Big Thunder is one of his absolute favorites at the other parks, so this was a non-negotiable, and Paris's version is special. It had been having issues all day and the standby was long and crawling, so we bit the bullet and bought the line-skip to guarantee ourselves a ride — worth it. All three of us came off agreeing this is the best version of Big Thunder we've done. The trick that sets it apart: the ride is built on its own island out in the Rivers of the Far West, so the station is on the mainland and the trains dive through tunnels underneath the river to reach the mountain and back. That single design choice — the runaway train disappearing under the water — gives it a sense of journey none of the other Big Thunders have. We wandered back through Disney Village on the way to the hotel, grabbed a snack, and did a little souvenir browsing before calling it a night.

Day Three: An early start, and finishing strong

Our last full day was, to the considerable displeasure of Preston and Catrina, an alarm-clock day. Disney Adventure World was offering early entry, and getting in ahead of the general public is the single best tool you have for beating both the lines and — this week especially — the heat. So we got up early, whether everyone liked it or not.

My own contribution to the morning was cutting myself shaving, badly, and then spending the better part of our first thirty minutes in the park trying to get my face to stop bleeding. Not my finest hour. But we recovered.

We made a beeline for Frozen Ever After in the new World of Frozen, and timed it almost perfectly — we walked up right as the queue opened for the day. It's essentially the same boat ride as the one at EPCOT, drifting through Arendelle past audio-animatronic figures of Anna, Elsa, Olaf and the rest set to the songs, but I actually liked this one more than its Florida predecessor. The difference is the queue: Paris's really sets the mood and builds the world before you ever board, so you arrive at the boats already inside the story. The ride itself felt a touch longer and smoother, and the effects alone are worth the wait. For a land that had been open a matter of weeks, it was in beautiful shape.

From World of Frozen we crossed into the Worlds of Pixar section for Ratatouille: The Adventure — the trackless dark ride where you shrink down to Rémy's size and scurry through Gusteau's restaurant, dodging feet and pots and pans across a blend of 3D screens and physical sets. We'd already ridden the version at EPCOT, and this is pretty much the exact same experience, give or take some language variations. Fittingly so, as it turns out: the Paris ride is the original, and Florida's was the copy — Disney built this one here in 2014 and liked it enough that it eventually cloned it for EPCOT. Same great ride either way.

Right next door in the same Worlds of Pixar section was Crush's Coaster — no line-skip available on this one, so we waited it out in standby. It's a spinning coaster themed to Finding Nemo, and it's a fun ride, though it got Preston a little queasy with all the spinning. For me the first half is real fun — a genuinely good outdoor spinning-coaster layout — and then the second half is the proverbial "coaster in a box," the part where you're whipped around a dark building in the classic wild-mouse style. Fun, but nothing super special once the lights go out.

While Preston and Catrina peeled off for a snack — and Preston squeezed in a second ride on Spider-Man while they waited — I knocked out the two rides I still wanted, solo. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is close to the Florida version, though without the fourth dimension — there's no trick where the elevator rolls out of the shaft and travels horizontally; here it's a straightforward drop-tower haunted-elevator ride. But the queue and the interior of the building are enormous and beautifully done. And Avengers Assemble: Flight Force is the old Rock 'n' Roller Coaster clone re-themed to the Avengers, so I already knew the launched, looping layout cold. The new story and queue are very well put together — a real upgrade in that department — but the ride hardware itself is still a little dated and a touch rough. On balance, still a better experience than the Aerosmith version it replaced.

With Adventure World handled, we crossed back to Disneyland Park to mop up the things we'd missed. One of my favorite quiet discoveries was strolling the arcades that run parallel to Main Street U.S.A. — the Liberty Arcade and the Discovery Arcade, covered galleries tucked behind the shopfronts on either side. Paris built them because of the weather; they give you a sheltered way to walk the length of Main Street out of the rain. On a scorching day they gave us something just as valuable: a shaded, uncrowded break from the sun, lined with old dioramas and displays. A genuinely unique part of this park.

And then, finally, Pirates of the Caribbean — open at last after its refurbishment. It was worth the wait across three days. Paris's Pirates absolutely destroys its Florida counterpart, with more scenes, actual drops, and a grander sense of scale; it might come up just short of the California original, but it's in the conversation, and it's always a fun ride. We also made a point of hunting down two more Paris-only oddities: La Tanière du Dragon, the animatronic dragon that lurks in a cave underneath Sleeping Beauty Castle — a genuinely great effect that no other Disney castle has — and Le Passage Enchanté d'Aladdin, the little walkthrough attraction of Aladdin scenes tucked into Adventureland.

By mid-afternoon the heat had beaten us down, so we ducked inside the Disneyland Hotel — the flagship resort right at the park entrance, which reopened a couple of years ago after a lavish top-to-bottom redo into a celebration of Disney royalty — just to walk through and cool off and gawk at the lobby. From there we grabbed an Uber over to the Val d'Europe shopping centre nearby, which was, frankly, insane — enormous, packed with people, and stuffed with more places to eat than we could sort through. We grabbed a bite and took in the spectacle.

Back at the hotel, Catrina was completely gassed — three days of parks in a heatwave will do that — so she tapped out for the evening, and Preston and I headed back into Disneyland Park for a father-and-son closer. We didn't have a ton of time, but the evening crowds had thinned out, and we took advantage: re-rides on Buzz Lightyear, Pirates, and Big Thunder, one after another, before staking out a spot on Main Street for the nighttime show.

That show is Disney Tales of Magic, which debuted in January 2025 as the park's new after-dark spectacular, replacing the long-running Disney Illuminations. It throws everything at the castle at once — projection mapping across the whole facade of Sleeping Beauty Castle, synchronized fountains, fireworks, lasers, and a fleet of drones lighting up the sky above, all set to a run of beloved Disney songs. Standing there with Preston at the end of three long days, watching the castle dissolve into color, it was a genuinely lovely way to close out our time in the parks.

Final thoughts

Disneyland Paris may not be the best Disney resort in the world. The Sequoia Lodge room was a real letdown, a couple of the older coasters are rougher than anything at this level of park has a right to be, and the heat and the closures nibbled at the edges of the trip. But none of that is the headline. The headline is that this is still a great pair of parks — Disneyland Park is arguably the most beautiful of all the castle parks, its Pirates and Big Thunder and Phantom Manor beat or rival the American versions, and it rewards the kind of aimless exploring that the newer parks have mostly engineered out.

And we caught the second gate at a genuinely historic moment. Disney Adventure World is only a few months into its new life, and it's already gone from the park everyone used to skip to one worth a full day. With more expansion still going up behind the walls — headlined by the first-ever Lion King land, a whole new water-based attraction built around Pride Rock and promised as a world first — this place is only going to get better.

For now, though, the parks were behind us. Next stop: central Paris.