Day 5 Part 3 - This part is text heavy because it includes our travel from DLP to Paris.
We then walked through Adventureland to Frontierland for one last ride on Big Thunder Mountain of course. We used our last club fp though even the standby line was short this early, and got the first row. It was fun but the middle is better.
We went into one last gift shop to get the last item I wanted to pick up and then headed back to Sequoia to get our bags and take the bus back to the parks/village/train station. We had asked which stop on the RER A we needed to go to when we were checking out and she gave us a map and said to take the train to the Auber station.
Inside the train station at Disney Village there are two different train sections, there’s the RER that goes into Paris and other areas then there’s another section that goes to places further out like Nice. We didn’t realize this at first. You want the section that’s closet to the Village not the resort bus stop. Once we had this part sorted out we got in line to get our tickets and bought them from the machine. We didn't have a problem using a US chip card rather than a true chip and pin card in the machine or anywhere.
We put our tickets in the turnstile, it spit it out and we each went through. Our bags fit well through these turnstiles but they won’t fit this well later. We got on the train and little did we know the person helping us was a well dressed homeless man who wanted money for the help. He handed out cards in English explaining it and then came back through collecting the cards and money. We didn’t give him money, I told him I didn’t have cash. I got told off in French but I’ve no idea what he said. It’s quite the scam and it seemed everyone else in our car gave him cash. It’s a good thing to be aware but we hadn’t read about anything like this so while we knew to be care of pick pockets and scammers trying to hand you stuff you “dropped” this was a new one.
There were a couple of buskers that came on at one station and played and then walked through asking for cash and then got off a stop or two later. Overall this was the most active, for lack of a better word, train we were on for the rest of our trip.
The ride into the city was about 45 minutes maybe an hour, I didn’t really look at my watch since I was looking at things outside the windows. We got off at the Auber station and looked at the sorte (exit) signs. We knew we needed to be close to the opera house so we followed the signs to there. Little did we know, until we got above ground, that the Auber RER station is connected to the Opera metro station. So while above ground the Auber station is a 10-15 minute walk from our hotel, underground it was a short walk to the Opera station.
This is where things got funny, at least after it was done we got a good laugh about it. We ran our tickets through the turnstile again and I went through turning my suitcase sideways so it would fit through because these turnstiles were more narrow than the one’s at DLP. I have 4 wheels so it was easy to do. My friend has 2 wheels and kept it the normal way which made it get stuck. She got through the turnstile but there was also this little door thing after the turnstile that you have to go through. Little did we know that if you don’t exit fast enough or hold it open that it will lock and trap you between the turnstile and the door. She tried to squeeze through but couldn’t fit. Thankfully a nice lady that spoke English came up behind her and realized what was going on and used her pass to get the whole thing to unlock and she was able to get past the door and they got her suitcase shoved through. It definitely set us in a panic because there were no workers around and no one seemed to care and we weren’t sure what to do. Looking back on it it’s absolutely hilarious because she got stuck in the turnstile. We learned to hold the door open and go through them quickly after that even without our suitcases.
Then there were the stairs. I’m sure there was an elevator somewhere but we never saw one. Luckily this was a station that didn’t have a ton of stairs but we still had to drag the suitcases up the stairs. When we got up to the top we saw the opera house and after looking at google realized that our hotel was a 3 minute walk down the street. The intersection, like many in Paris, had several streets connecting through it, so once we weaved around to the correct street we made the short walk down the Rue de la Paix to the Park Hyatt Vendome to check in.
Day 5 continued - https://www.disboards.com/threads/w...-paris-and-paris.3686192/page-3#post-59341217