Chapter 1: General Tips
If you give it a chance, I hope I’ll be able to convince you why this section needs to come first.
While there are other circles that we will discuss that may not be of any interest to you (maybe you don’t have any interest in seeing shows or meeting characters, or you or your loved ones are tube-fed and the food portion of the guide doesn’t apply to you), whatever it is that you do at the Parks, well… you’re AT the Parks.
It is the background of any activity or interaction you have during your trip to Disneyland Paris, and as we all know that stress is cumulative, anything we can do to reduce our stress and our triggers will give us that much more capacity to handle the other stressors that come along in our day.
So, this circle of Disneyland Paris is one that we should always be aware of, as it is always going to be around us whenever we’re facing our fears about a ride we want to go on, or we’re dealing with the fact that someone violated our personal space for the hundredth time that hour.
Just being in the Parks is exhausting.
Do you remember before when we were talking about the Blue Booklet and the different ratings that it gives for the sensory experiences for each ride?
Well, despite not knowing what methodology they used to come up with their numbers, I’m going to assign a number to the activity of just being in the Parks: somewhere in the 2-3 range, both for the visual and auditory stimulation categories. And, of course, this could increase on a really busy day/time, or could decrease based on choices made to seek out areas of lesser stimulation. To put that into perspective, simply being within the parks is around the same level of stimulation that you may get when riding the “Pirates of the Caribbean” attraction. Although hopefully there is less of a risk of being splashed. Our goal here, then, is to make those times between stimulating rides more of a ‘downtime’ than being on the rides themselves!
All of that having been said, there are some surprisingly simple aspects of the Parks that we have discovered that helped us immensely during our visits.
But first, a disclaimer! Because of course there needs to be one. During all of our visits to the Parks, we have gone when Walt Disney Studios has been under renovation for the addition of the Frozen lands (or whatever they are actually called) to the Studios Park. This is significant as the physical layout of the Studios Park will, in time, be vastly different from what we experienced. Not only because there will be a new large area that is added onto the Studios Park, but because the constrictions and restrictions present during the construction phase will be removed, allowing visitors to, well, have much more space (and, I think, more options) to get from point A to point B.
Ok. Disclaimer over. On to the good stuff.