Disneyland Paris: Web-slinging, parades and everything we didn't pack for

Every trip we have taken so far now feels like a rehearsal for this one.

Five weeks. Two countries. One five-year-old who had opinions about all of it. Four days in Paris, four weeks in Spain, and two more days in Paris before flying home. The longest holiday we have been on, and the longest Ayaansh has been away from everything he calls home.

No other place could have started it better.

Getting there#

Vadodara to Delhi, Delhi to Paris, and a taxi out to the hotel. Ayaansh did what he has always done on a long journey, which is to sleep through the difficult parts and wake up hungry for the good ones.

We stayed at the Ibis Budget in Val d'Europe, a clean room one train stop from the parks and nothing more. The math of a five week holiday changes what you book, and whatever we saved here was owed to Spain.

The homework#

This was his first Disney. And ours too.

For weeks before we left we gave him homework. Films and story books, one every few evenings, so that by the time he walked through those gates the characters would not be strangers but old friends he happened to be meeting for the first time.

Boy, did it work.

Walking in#

Nothing prepares you for the scale of the place. Nothing.

Main Street opens out ahead of you and at the far end of it, small at first and then not small at all, stands the castle. Ayaansh had seen it at the start of every film we played him for a month. Not once had it occurred to him that he could simply walk towards it.

So we did. Slowly, not because we didn't want to rush, but also because we wanted our adrenaline to find peace amidst the music, the shops, the installations, and the ocean of thousands of people all pointed the same way, every one of them wearing those famous disney ears and that child-like grin on their faces.

In the middle of it, a five-year-old holding both our hands and saying absolutely nothing. For Ayaansh, that is the loudest sound he makes.

Three days, two parks#

Day one we bought Premier Access and used it without mercy while our legs were fresh. Day two belonged to Disneyland Park, day three to Adventure World. There is more here than any family covers in a week. We got better each day at deciding what to walk past. Ayaansh never did. Slinky Dog, Dumbo, Aladdin, and every character who would stand still long enough to be met.

The parade#

If rides are what a theme park sells, the experience is what Disney does.

The street clears, people settle onto the sidewalk, and Ayaansh went down with them, sat on the floor at the very front with his legs crossed, which turns out to be the best seat in the park and also the cheapest. Then the music, and then the floats, characters waving from places children did not know characters could stand. He shouted each name before it reached us, because he had done the homework. He did not expect them to wave back. They did.

The mission#

And then there was Spider-Man.

Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure sits in Marvel Avengers Campus. Peter Parker's Spider-Bots multiply out of control, he calls in Spider-Man, and then he calls in you. You climb into a vehicle and sling webs with your bare hands to catch them.

Now read that again as a five-year-old.

Ayaansh was not confused and he had not misunderstood the ride. It told him he had been chosen, and he took it at its word. This was not a game. Those were not points. Peter Parker was in trouble, help had been asked for, and our boy was going to do his part.

He came off it gleaming with pride in a way we have not seen before. In a park that size, the one thing he wanted was to go back and do it again. And when he met Spider-Man himself a little later, the two joined in his head into one solid fact that no parent was going to talk him out of. He had been called in on a mission, and then he had met the man he did it for.

He was what even you and I aspire to be. A superhero.

Arendelle, and two nights#

Marvel was his. Arendelle turned out to be everybody's. We rode Frozen on day one with the Premier Access in hand. Did we come out awestruck? I will not be answering that. On day three we went back and gave it a whole evening, a meal included, staying on as the light went and the place turned into a different version of itself.

Twice, after dark, the park did something we are still talking about. On day two they projected a show onto the castle itself, so the walls stopped being walls. The building we had been walking towards for two days turned into something else entirely, and to watch it Ayaansh had to be up on a fortress of his own. My shoulders.

On day three it was water, light, projection and then drones, in formation in the sky above a theme park, at the end of a day that was already full. We had come for the rides. We stayed up past bedtime for these. Was it worth it? The person writing this article says "Absolutely!". The person who carried a sleeping child out through the gates might differ.

What we didn't pack for#

We had checked the forecast, packed jackets, and congratulated ourselves on being organised parents. What we had not packed for was single-digit temperatures and rain, in the middle of May. So we did what every under-prepared parent in that park has done before us and bought warm layers inside, at park prices. An expensive lesson. But a very warm child.

Food was easier than we feared, one or two vegetarian options almost everywhere. We ate at the Stark Factory more than once, a short walk from the Spider-Man mission itself, and Ayaansh finished every meal there with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had earned it.

The thing we all knew#

We knew. All three of us. Being Mickey today is somebody's job. It is a costume, there is a human being inside it, and none of that is a secret.

And yet we queued for an hour to meet them anyway. Happily. Twice over, on some days. That is the thing Disney does, and the remarkable part is that it does not need to hide how it works. A grown man who understands exactly how it works will still stand in that queue, and will still feel something when the character kneels down to his son's height to sign his autograph book.

Magic is not the bit you cannot explain. It is the bit you can explain, and choose anyway.

Leaving#

Four nights in, we packed our bags and pointed ourselves at Spain.

What has stayed with us is not any single ride. He spent a month learning who these characters were, and three days deciding they were worth standing an hour in the cold for. So did we.

Some places you visit. But Disney happens to you.

There is a great deal of Europe still ahead of us. Valencia, which became home for the best part of a month, and everywhere we travelled out from it. But this was the beginning, and the beginning belonged entirely to him.

From here and beyond!