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Magical Christmas time at Disneyland Paris (November 2022)

After my first Disney park experience in Shanghai I knew I wanted to visit other parks around the world – unfortunately covid hit and put a halt on those plans, but finally in 2022 I finally booked a trip, my first time in Disneyland Paris! I did plan to travel alone, but eventually persuaded my sister to come with me on my birthday trip. My birthday is at the end of November and that works out perfectly to see the park festive with Christmas decorations (Christmas is also my favourite time of year). We booked this in April of 2022 and stayed for 2-nights with 3-days in the parks. It was around £450 for the two of us for the room on site and park tickets and we were pretty happy with that – we did book before they had actually announced the festive celebration dates, so it may have increased in price after this. Disneyland Paris has 2 parks, so I felt like this was a good step for me before making the trip to Disney World with the 4 parks (trip also now booked with my sister after she really enjoyed Paris!) – so we had a lot to squeeze into our time!

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ZooParc de Beauval, France 2022

I already posted about visiting the pandas at ZooParc de Beauval back in March 2022 (where did the time go, I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since this trip!), I’m now finally getting around to posting about the rest of the zoo. It is a huge site with so many different animals to see – and I took so many photos it was hard to narrow them all down. Because of the size, this is definitely not a 1-day type of place – with the distance it was for me to get there, we stayed on-property in one of the Zoo’s hotels for 3 nights, so we ended up with 2 full days and 2-3 hours in the afternoon that we arrived. This was a good amount of time to see everything on a first visit, but could easily go back for that same length of time again. Going in March was pretty good because the Zoo was never particularly busy, or because of the large size, people were generally very spread out so you could always get a good view of all the animals. The Zoo is conveniently split into 3 areas, it’s very possible to walk all the way across the zoo, however they have installed a very convenient telecabine which you can take between the north entrance by the lions in the Zone Nord all the way over to the opposite site of the zoo in Zone Sud by the elephants – this had shorter operation times than the opening of the zoo, so getting there at opening time means a walk all the way over to Zone Sud to get to the pandas, and if you miss the last one back, a walk all the way back at the end of the day. Some of the cabins even had a glass floor so you could really see everything all around, I’m not sure I liked this so much seeing the ground go past beneath me! This was a great way to get a good view of the whole zoo plus you were directly over some of the animals. The Zoo also has plenty of play areas for kids, and plenty of restaurants and food/drink kiosks – which ones are open just depend on the time of year, so on our visit most of the small kiosks were closed.

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P A N D A S @ Z O O P A R C D E B E A U V A L 2022

Despite Zoo Parc de Beauval having pandas for 10 years, and France not being all that far away from the UK, this year I finally made my first visit to see the French pandas! Pre-pandemic I thought I might book a trip in the Summer or Autumn of 2020, which of course didn’t happen. But in February I was just checking out the Beauval website to see how the prices looked across the year when I saw a Winter deal which lasted until the end of March, which I couldn’t resist, so this was a very last minute planned trip! This trip was in early March 2022 and we went for 2 full days at the zoo, with a couple of hours added on on the day of our arrival. For me this was a perfect amount of time for a panda trip to see this fantastic zoological park and gardens. Whilst I had seem pictures of the pandas themselves before, I had no idea what the enclosure or surroundings looked like at all – I sure was impressed with the elaborate Chinese design, it was really quite something.

I ended up taking almost 3000 photos at Beauval, so while this post is photo-heavy, this is the extreme cut-down number of adorable panda photos that I took!

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