25 May 2016 – Home to Disneyland Paris

So The Lions, Tiggers and Bears Tour 2016 departure day arrived and the BBC started the day with breaking news of a French fuel strike, riots in Belgium and migrant activity in Calais – all this was on top of Lucy requiring hospital treatment to remove a splinter from behind her finger nail the day before! What else could go wrong…

We decided on the tour name this time as this will be our last use of our Disney annual passes and we have also planned a trip to visit Panda bears in a Belgium zoo. The tour was planned thanks to two inset days before half term the idea being that Disney will be quiet.

After loading the van and collecting Lucy from school we set off heading for Dover, after recent tunnel delays we thought it was about time to give the ferry a chance and to be honest the tunnel pet charge for dogs has gone up and now having two dogs the ferry ended up cheaper!

Listening to the news stories we opted to fill our fuel tank in Dover and also filled two 20 litre jerry cans which sat nicely in our back box- we luckily owned these from previous trips where we filled up on the cheap in Andorra and Luxembourg.

As we sat fuelling up in Dover we received a text message from P&O saying our ferry was going to have a 60 minute delay, this was bad news as it meant no chance of making Paris in a oner. Disappointed but 2 hour early we rolled into the port expecting a long wait but to our surprise they put us on an early crossing, our luck had turned.

We arrived in France just after dark following a nice quiet ferry crossing. I am sure we enjoyed the ferry more than the dogs who had to stay in the van on the car deck.

A normal boring drive to Disney followed but our new satnav decided to go silent, a couple of mistakes added a few miles to our total. We approached Disney just after 2am and knew of a service station on approach we thought it would be silly to drive by if it had fuel and sure enough we filled the tank so the jerry cans remain in the back box – not sure what all the fuss was about!

Straight to sleep at the park gates ready for a busy Disney day tomorrow.