TacoCat’s Travels #48 (Paris): Disney Thrills and Chills! 🎢

taco.cat (67)in TravelFeed • 5 years ago (edited)

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Hey Steemit!

So if you didn't catch the last few posts, this series is about our trip to Paris way back in June 2016 when we went there for summer school! Both of us enrolled in a Luxury Management course at a college called HEC Paris! The course itself was 2 weeks long, but we booked our flight a week earlier so we could travel and explore the city.

In the last post, we were on our day-long trip to Disneyland Paris! There are 2 separate parks inside the Disneyland compound - Walt Disney Studios Park, and Disneyland Park. We just finished exploring all the different lands in Disneyland Park, and we rode Space Mountain and Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast! Alright, now you're all caught up!

9 June 2016. Thursday.

There was still a little bit left to explore in Disneyland Park, in the area called Main Street USA, which was near the entrance so we decided to walk around on the way out towards Walt Disney Studios.

It was getting pretty warm out, and we passed by this place called Discovery Arcade, and decided to check it out.

Turns out, it wasn't actually an arcade, it was an exhibition gallery dedicated to the golden age of invention, which was pretty cool too. Either way, it was indoors and allowed us to hide from the sun so that's good.

The "arcade" itself is actually just a sheltered walkway behind some shops, but it had some display cases with models and figurines of classic Disney characters which looked pretty cool.

The glass ones looked so cool!

It’s weird seeing Tinkerbell be the biggest character

I was so scared of touching the glass ones in case they broke because they’re unbelievably expensive!

After going through the walkway, visited some of the shops. You know what that means! Funny pictures in costumes and hats!

I found this R2D2 hoodie that looked really cool and decided to try it! And got Sean to be Darth Vader because why not right. XD

We even made a new friend with Duffy the Disney Bear! I didn't even know Duffy was a thing until we saw him in person, but apparently he's the mascot of the Disney parks, and he debuted in 2004 at Tokyo Disneysea!

With that, we finished exploring Disneyland Park! It was about 4pm when we left, so on to Walt Disney Studios!

Walt Disney Studios is considerably smaller compared to Disneyland Park, so I think we left at the right time since it wouldn't take as long to explore it probably. Here's a map for reference:

Walt Disney Studios opened on 16 March 2002, and as the name suggests, it is dedicated to show business, themed after movies, production, and behind-the-scenes. They have a few of the more thrilling rides like the Tower of Terror, and also host themed events and shows, as well as character encounters.

Since there was less to see here, we pretty much went straight for the Tower of Terror. I had heard of this ride before, but neither of us have ever been on it, so it was pretty exciting.

The full name of the ride in Paris is The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror - A New Dimension of Chills, which I guess in inspired by the TV series. But anyway, it is a dark free-fall thrill ride where guests enter the fictional Hollywood Tower Hotel, and follows the story of The Twilight Zone, where people have been mysteriously disappearing from the elevator under some supernatural influence. So it starts with the riders going up the tower, then rapidly dropping multiple times. The finale of the ride involves a drop of nearly 200 feet!

Unfortunately our faces got blocked by the label

The ride was actually pretty scary, and before the final drop, they open up the front screen to show you how high up you really are before the plunge. I remember feeling my organs shift upwards in my body every time the car dropped. It's definitely not a ride for people afraid of heights.

After that, we saw another ride called RC Racer, and decided to give it a shot too!

So RC Racer is a steel shuttle roller coaster themed around RC from Disney-Pixar's Toy Story movies where guest ride in RC on an orange, half loop track.

We didn't actually know what this ride was about before we joined the queue, since it was pretty short, but we soon got nervous when we saw what the ride entailed. In RC Racer, you climb aboard the huge remote-controlled RC car, and are propelled forwards and backwards through the station building in a semi-circular "half pipe" of track, quickly building up enough speed to hit the top height of almost 80 feet (24 metres).

It was hard to get a picture, but just imagine a really big half-pipe.

It starts off pretty tame, but it ramps up really quickly! We were seated right at the front of the RC car too, and it was really scary when we got to the end of the half pipe and were practically 90 degrees to the ground, backwards and forwards! Here's a video of what it looks like:

Needless to say, we were pretty shaken up after those 2 rides, and were pretty much done with rides after that. So we decided to just walk around and explore.

The RC Racer ride was in an area called Toy Story Playland, and being a fan of Toy Story (and Pixar movies in general), I had to see everything!

Like the Pixar Ball!

There was also a Slinky Dog ride that was kinda kiddy so we didn't ride it. It's basically a super tame roller coaster, where the cars move up and down a gentle incline in a circle.

The entrance to Toy Story Playland.

Other Pixar references include:

A Cars attraction, that's kinda like the spinning teacups in Disneyland Park.

A Finding Nemo roller coaster called Crush's Coaster, which is a dark, indoor roller coaster similar to Space Mountain, but in the theme of Finding Nemo of course.

We found the Monsters' Inc. door! I don't think there was actually a Monster's Inc. attraction, it was just some statues/props.

We soon arrived back at the main entrance. But there's still a whole other area to explore, and a little bit outside of these 2 parks but still within the Disneyland compound. So I'll leave that for the next post!