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. By far the longest holiday we have been on, and the longest Ayaansh has ever been away from everything he calls home.

No other place could have been a better start to a holiday of this nature.

Getting there#

Vadodara to Delhi, Delhi to Paris, and a taxi out to the hotel from there. 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. Sleep deprived parents and a well-slept child somehow beats every other combination that exists.

We stayed at the Ibis Budget in Val d'Europe. Nothing fancy, and it did not need to be. The math that governs a holiday of five weeks changes what you book. A clean room, one train stop away from the parks was all we needed, and everything else we saved kept back for the four weeks of Spain still ahead of us.

The homework#

This was his first Disney. And ours too.

For weeks before we left, we did something we have never done for a trip before. We gave him homework. Movies 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.

We had no idea whether it would work.

Boy, did it work.

Walking in#

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

You come through the gates and the 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. The famous Disney Castle. Ayaansh had seen that castle at the start of every single film we had played for 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.

It was colder than any of us had dressed for. And yet, not one person looked in a hurry to get indoors.

And in the middle of it, a five-year-old boy holding both our hands and saying absolutely nothing. Just trying to absorb the massiveness of a place like this. For Ayaansh, that is the loudest sound he makes.

Three days, two parks#

Day one we bought Premier Access and used it without mercy, sweeping through the best of both parks while our legs were fresh and our optimism was still fully intact. Day two belonged to Disneyland Park. Day three to Adventure World.

Three days sounds generous, at times even unnecessary until you are standing in it. There is more here than any family covers in a week, the real skill is deciding what you are happy to walk past. We got better at it each day. Ayaansh never did, and would have happily queued for everything twice.

The Slinky Dog ride was an instant favourite, but then so was Dumbo, and so was Alladin. And to top it all, the character meet-ups were something else entirely. He did not approach them the way you approach a stranger in a costume. He approached them the way you approach someone you have been told a great deal about, and have finally been introduced to.

The parade#

If rides are what a theme park sells, the experience is what Disney does. And when we talk of the experience, the famous Disney Parade finds a spot in the top few.

The street clears. People settle onto the side walk, 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 starts somewhere out of sight and rolls towards you, and the floats come. Colour and height and characters waving from places children did not know characters could stand. Ayaansh watched it with awe, pointing at each one and shouting the name before it reached us, because not only did he know the names, he found a strange familiarity with the characters. He had done the homework. And he didn't expect them to wave back. But they did.

The mission#

And then there was Spider-Man.

Spider-Man W.E.B. Adventure sits in Marvel Avengers Campus, and the story it tells you is this. W.E.B. stands for the Worldwide Engineering Brigade. Peter Parker is showing off his newest invention at an open house, a swarm of little Spider-Bots, and a bug in the code sets them multiplying out of control. He calls in Spider-Man. He also calls in you. You climb into a W.E.B. SLINGER vehicle, and you sling webs with your bare hands to catch the bots before they overrun the whole Campus.

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

Because Ayaansh was not confused, and he had not misunderstood the ride. The ride told him he had been chosen, and he simply 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.

We were there for 3 days and there is no way we could have walked out without doing this one again. And thinking of it, that is the whole point. A park with more attractions than you can count in three days, and the five-year-old wanted to go back and do the same one.

When he met Spider-Man himself a little later, the two things joined together in his head and became 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.

We have taken him to theme parks before. This was the first time he was inside the story instead of standing outside it. He was what even you and I aspire to be. A superhero.

Arendelle, twice#

Marvel was his. Arendelle turned out to be everybody's.

We got there first on day one, Premier Access in hand, and rode the Frozen ride to our heart's content. Did we come out awestruck? I will not be answering that.

Then on day three we went back and gave it the whole evening. We even grabbed a meal there and stayed on as the daylight went down, turning the place into a different version of itself.

Two nights#

Twice, after dark, the park did something we are still talking about.

The first was on day two, in Disneyland Park. They project the show directly onto the castle, so the walls stop being walls and become the screen. The building you have been walking towards for two days, the one he had seen at the start of every film we played him, turns into something else entirely while you struggle to find way for your eyes among the thousands of cameras that make failed attempts at capturing what can only be witnessed with your eyes.

To watch the marvel on the castle, Ayaansh had to be up on a fortress of his own. My shoulders.

The second was on day three, over in Adventure World, a short walk from where we had spent the evening in Arendelle. Water, light, projection, and then drones. Actual 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 well past bedtime for these. Was it worth it? The person writing this article says "Absolutely!". The person carrying a sleeping child all the way through the exit gates over to the train station might differ.

What we didn't pack for#

Now the part we got wrong.

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. Our jackets were good enough to handle a cool evening. They were not the sort that handle a cold, wet morning spent standing still in a queue.

So we did what every under-prepared parent in that park has done before us, and bought warm layers inside the park, at park prices. An expensive lesson. But thankfully a very warm child.

Eating#

Food was far more manageable than we had feared. Most outlets carried at least one or two vegetarian options, which is all you really need when you are moving fast and eating between rides.

We found ourselves at the Stark Factory more than once, sometimes circumstantially, sometimes with a little more intention. It sits in Marvel Avengers Campus, a short walk from the Spider-Man mission itself, and Ayaansh ate every meal there with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had earned it.

On a park day with a five-year-old, quick food beats good food more often than we care to admit.

The thing we all knew#

Here is what we keep coming back to.

We knew. All three of us. With all the character meet-and-greets, there is a person in there. Being Mickey today is somebody's job. It is a costume and there is a human being inside it and none of that is a secret.

And yet we stood in hour-long queues 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 even need to hide how it works. You can know exactly what you are looking at and it still gets you. A grown man who understands perfectly well how it works, and will still queue for an hour, and will still want the photograph, and will still feel something when the character kneels down to his son's height and signs 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. It is that all three of us made the same choice, over and over, for three days. He spent a month learning who these characters were. He spent three days deciding they were worth standing an hour in the cold for, and so did we.

Some places you visit. But Disney happens to you.

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

From here and beyond!