The Log Dog Blog: Disneyland Paris: Day 1 (Times Two!)

For my birthday this past May, C's gift to me was a trip to Disneyland Paris! I immediately submitted my request to use my three personal days and I've been counting down this trip since the school year began! We've been here twice before – once just for the day when we visited Paris back in March 2007, and then again in January 2016 when we were here for a few days – and were looking forward to becoming even more familiar with these two parks!

On Tuesday, I finished up my parent-teacher conferences, C picked me up from school, and we were on our way to JFK just before 3 pm for our 11 pm flight. We have flown out of JFK many times, and it typically takes us about five hours to drive there. We should have had plenty of time! However, there was bad weather and some people clearly don't know how to drive when it's raining. It was also Election Day, so I don't know if that played a role in the volume of traffic we encountered. Finally, there were several accidents that brought traffic to a complete standstill. As in we only made it about 40 miles in three hours.

As you might imagine, we were not happy.

With each passing minute, it became more and more obvious that we would not be making our flight.

We pulled off the highway and considered our options – continue on to New York and find a hotel along the way or turn around and go home. Either way, we were going to have to look for another flight for the next day and call the Disneyland Hotel to let them know we would not be checking in on time.

We decided to go home – we'd at least be able to spend the night with Maddy and Ginny and it would make things easier for C to rearrange our travel.

I just have to say that I am so incredibly lucky to be married to C. He is an expert travel planner. EXPERT. He spent several hours searching for flights and making phone calls and was up long after I fell asleep getting things in order. We didn't actually have airline tickets until about 3 am! We thought it would end up costing far more than it did to get a last minute flight to Paris, but C found an amazing deal for us the next day, out of JFK, on American, at 5:15 pm.

The downside is that we are out the money we spent on the Norwegian flight we missed and also the one night at the Disneyland Hotel because we purchased a package and therefore could not modify our check-in date. Very frustrating. But in the end, the only thing that mattered was getting to France, so we decided to just let it go and enjoy our trip!

We got up early on Wednesday morning, with C only having had a few hours of sleep, and left for New York around 7:30 am. The drive was blissfully uneventful and we arrived with plenty of time to spare, even with a few stops along with way.

MUCH better than the approximately 15 mph we averaged
over the three hours on our first attempt to get to JFK!

We parked at our usual long-term lot and happened to get just about the closest parking spot to the door in what is a monstrous parking lot, so we felt that our lucked had certainly changed for the better!

We checked in without any difficulty and after a less-than-pleasant TSA experience, we were at the gate and boarding our plane. One silver lining of taking a different flight was that our new flight was on a 767, which had a 2-3-2 seat configuration, so we were able to have two seats alone!

Our flight took a little less than 7 hours and we landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport around 6:15 am. We had only carry-on luggage, so we were able to grab a bite to eat at the airport while we waited for our train, which left at 8:20 am.