Early Monday morning, I took the car down to the garage to get the winter tires removed, and have the spring tires put back on. When I say early, I mean, I had to be there at 7:30 am. Considering it was vacation time, that was like getting up at 5 on a regular day. :) By the time I had picked up some picnic food at the store, and came back home, the kids were all packed and ready to drive to Disneyland Paris.
It takes about 6 hours total driving time, but that doesn't include potty stops, food stops and gas stops. Naturally, we try to take care of all that at one stop, but it isn't always possible; especially when 7 different bladders are involved. So it ended up taking us about 8 1/2 hours to arrive at our hotel by the Park. Fortunately for us, our kids are pretty good car travelers. They have all these games they play with their stuffed animals, they play Uno on the fold down table in the car, they read, they nap. But the very favorite way to pass time in the car for the whole family is to listen to Harry Potter books on CD read by Jim Dale. It doesn't seem to matter which book, either. Last trip we listened to Order of the Phoenix, this trip it was Chamber of Secrets. Sometimes they actually get sad we are stopping the car, because then they can't listen anymore! If only gas wasn't so expensive, they'd probably agree to us driving all over Europe, as long as they could listen to those stories.
We stopped off at the large French grocery store near the hotel and bought food for the next few days. We could have brought stuff with us, I suppose. But part of the fun of the whole trip is seeing all the cool stuff they have at this store, that we don't get in Switzerland OR Germany. This place is seriously gigantic, like Costco sized, with an upstairs full of clothes, toys, furniture and cooking gadgets. And that's just this store, which is inside a HUGE mall. Seriously, it takes you at least 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other on one branch, of which there are two. Upstairs and downstairs. HUGE!
Anyway, at the grocery store we picked up several delicious looking items from the bakery, including brioche and little tiny doughnuts. And around the corner I discovered cereal and candy sold in bulk! Be still my heart, no one sells that stuff in bulk around here. So, naturally, we filled up a couple bags with the kind of cereal we only eat on vacation even though we knew that around the corner they were selling actual Golden Grahams in a box. Squeee! We must have bought 6 boxes? I don't know. At the time of this writing, they have all been consumed by very happy children.
I won't even start on all the different cheeses and meats they had for sale. But honestly, we now try to plan a good few hours of every Disneyland trip just to browsing through this mall, and especially this grocery store. Sounds pathetic, I know. But if you saw what little was available for purchase where we normally shop, you would totally understand. It's kind of like being forced to shop in what amounts to a 7-11, or Circle K, and then suddenly being taken to Sam's club. You would be so overwhelmed you wouldn't know what to look at first. That's how we feel going from a Swiss Migros to this French Auchon.
We got the kids home to the hotel, fed them and put them to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour, considering we were on vacation time. We knew they would be up early, full of excitement and wanting to hit the Park as soon as possible. And I found some photos that we took from our first stay here, last year. It's like a little apartment.
There is a bedroom with bunk beds, a bathroom with shower,
a kitchen, dining table,
and living room with two couches that turn into beds on the main floor. Upstairs there is another bedroom
and a bathroom with a tub/shower. They even have a unit with a third bedroom, which would be good if we ever traveled wit
h extra people. I would have preferred to stay somewhere with no cooking facilities 😉 but the kids love this place and so does Chris. We did order pizza one night, and we always ate lunch in the park, so I did get enough of a break. I just like to tease.
Isn't Jim Dale that successful Inventor personality?