A Disney Parks Around the World Journey: Day 6 – Just Keep Swimming

“Just keep swimming.” – Dory

I woke up on the plane at 9:30AM London time which was 4:30AM at home. This meant I got a solid 5 hours of sleep which is more than double what I had gotten the previous night. The moment I woke up the flight attendants pounced on me to give me my preordered breakfast which was the “Cooked Breakfast”. It came with sausage, bacon, scrambled egg, herbed potato rosti, blistered cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms, and baked beans with a seasonal fruit plate. That’s a lot of words to describe a breakfast.

I wasn’t that hungry, and just took a couple bites as I knew we had access to the Virgin Atlantic Revivals arrivals lounge in Heathrow. Given we had a 4.5 hour layover we would have ample time to go to the lounge, shower, change clothes, have breakfast, and change terminals prior to our next flight.

I changed out of the PJs and prepped for landing. We landed a little early at 10:24 AM which is just 5:24 AM at home. I’m normally up then anyway so I’m wide awake and not really jet lagged. Despite the size of the plane the gate didn’t have a jetway, so we ended up deplaning via stairs.

We were the first off plane as we were the last row in business class which was closest to the doors and typically that normally saves you a ton of time at immigration, but not today as that head start was mitigated by the need to take a shuttle from the airplane to the terminal. Thankfully, the immigration line was not that long, and since we are team carry on we just bypassed the luggage carousel.

One of the lesser known benefits of flying business class is that for some of the larger airports that have a lot of red eye flights there is an arrivals lounge. These lounges serve as a gap between when you land and when you can check into your hotel and allow you to freshen up for your day. Heathrow is one such airport, so we headed to the arrivals lounge and got there at 11:30 AM which was one hour prior to closing.

The showers were nice and modern. Nothing feels better than a shower after a day of traveling.

The breakfast options consisted of small continental breakfast area, and some warm food that could be ordered via the phone. It was more than enough for us, and we ordered a variety of things such as smoothies and eggs.

We stayed at the lounge till it closed at 12:30 PM and started to make the trek to terminal 4 which is not exactly close to terminal 3 where we were. For those not used to transiting in larger international airports, it can be a pretty significant distance from one terminal to the next and not just a brief 5-10 minute walk. In this case, in order to get to terminal 4, you had to take the train. Thankfully the train for transfers to terminal 4 and 5 were free. You just needed to get a free train ticket and you could use the train.

So we got a ticket and then we headed to Terminal 4.

We went through security again and we obviously have no TSA PreCheck in the UK so we had to do the full gamut of security measures. They are particularly strict on liquids and even had a station so you could pull your liquids and stick them in a quart size bag which made use of.

After security we headed to the Blush Premium Plaza Lounge that we have access to via our Priority Pass from either our Capital One Venture X card or our Amex Business Platinum card.

The lounge was nicer than average for a Priority Pass lounge. It had a self service bar, some food, soft drinks and the furniture was in decent condition.

I was pretty full from breakfast so I didn’t eat or drink anything. One of the things about flying business class and having lounge access in airports is you have an onslaught of food and drinks thrown at you so you are rarely hungry.

We waited for the gate to be assigned for our flight and at 2:30 PM we finally had a gate assignment for our flight that was scheduled to leave at 3:25 PM so we can start walking to our gate. This next flight wasn’t anything exciting. It was on Vueling, a low cost Spanish carrier.

We were also now flying to Paris Orly instead of Charles De Gaulle. This is great as CDG is absolutely massive and a pain to navigate. Orly is the smaller of the two and much faster to get through customs and out of the airport. By the time we got to the gate they were already boarding our group so we hopped in right in line. We felt so bad for the person in front of us, as she was at the wrong gate, as she was on an Air France flight to Charles de Gaulle that left 5 minutes ago and she was instead in line for a Vueling flight to Orly. We have had many mishaps while traveling so can totally empathize with that tragedy.

Boarding was swift with no issues. Vueling much like any low cost carrier flies primarily A320s and only has economy class seats so nothing really to write home on the seat front. It’s a standard low cost carrier experience. Again, being 5’3” legroom is never an issue for me.

Pushed off on time at 3:25PM, but didn’t get into the air for another 15 minutes.

The flight was swift and we landed at 5:55 PM Paris time which is 1 hour ahead of London. Unlike our last flight, we had a jetway that we thought would simplify things. Nope. That jetway led to a staircase that led to a bus that shuttled us to a terminal. Yes, that was just as convoluted as it sounded. We’ve definitely done the full gamut of planes, trains and automobiles over the last 24 hours so convoluted is definitely becoming the norm.

We proceeded through customs without much difficulty and followed the signs to the ride share pickup and called an Uber…. or so we thought. There were no less than 10 signs we followed to lead us to the ride share pickup, which ended up not being a ride share pickup. There was no ride share pick up anywhere near where the signs led us and we spent the next 20 minutes wandering around texting our Uber driver trying to figure out where it was. I felt so bad as he only spoke french, so I was trying to google translate on the fly where we were and he was doing the same to try and direct us where the ride share pickup actually was. It was an absolute comedy of errors.

We finally found him in the real ride share pick up area and our driver was impressively not aggravated with us.

Got to the apartment close to 8:00PM and we met Alexandra, the host outside. He was super nice, and spoke a little English. With my rudimentary French I was able to understand enough of what he was saying. We really wanted to stay on Disney property tonight but sadly due to the security restrictions you had to book a room 30 hours prior to arrival and we booked our Paris stay last second.

The apartment was impeccably clean and very nice, and an absolute bargain for a last second accommodation. It smelled and looked completely new. There were zero reviews when I booked it and there was clearly a dishwasher still to be installed and some other small fixtures and things that needed to be finished or mounted on walls so I suspect we were his first guests and retrospectively, we were also his first reviewers so my guess was likely right.

Lucy was excited for the bunk bed. The whole apartment had a Disney/Marvel theme to it which was nice touch.

There were no restaurants around as this was a residential area so we ordered some pizza from Vapiano, a local italian restaurant, via Door Dash. Vapiano wasn’t bad although the pepperoni was kinda weird like all foreign pepperoni tends to be. Of note, this was our first non-airplane or lounge food in 24 hours which was a very nice change of pace. I love free food and all, but sometimes you just need comfort food. It wasn’t bad and we were hungry enough to finish the whole pizza. We also Door Dashed some snack foods and croissants to eat tomorrow morning for Christmas breakfast. We would have preferred donuts, but given it was Christmas Eve the selection of places open was pretty lacking.

Afterwards, we just crashed out from sheer exhaustion. Tomorrow, two days late, we finally make it to Disneyland Paris.

Day 6, December 24nd, 2024 Step Count – 12,445 Steps

Total Step Count – 90,309

Read about the next day here.

Read about our previous day here.