Travel | My Disneyland Disaster (Part 1 of 2)

My first trip to a Disney Park was certainly an eventful one. In fact, I had a really wonderful few days away and Disneyland Paris was all that I expected it to be and more. But my gushing about how magical it was is not what you came to this post, with its mildly clickbaity title, to read. Instead, this is one of two tales [part two here] about the nail-biting delays we faced on our way to catch our trains.

Disaster #1: Eurostar Baggage Check, St Pancras International, London, United Kingdom (approximately 8:30AM BST)

I'm sure many of you know the feeling: you've gotten up before the crack of dawn in order to get to the airport or the station: you're running purely on caffeine and it feels like mid-afternoon until you check your watch and are reminded that it's not even 9AM yet. My point is, you can't be bothered with any trouble - you just want to stroll through baggage check and passport control and sit yourself down as a big, expensive vehicle transports you to your exciting holiday destination (maybe you'll even have a cheeky nap).


So we reach the baggage check, pop our suitcases and hand luggage into trays on the conveyor belt and walk through the metal detector. We watch as our things emerge through the mysterious black curtain and take our suitcases off of their trays, waiting patiently for our hand luggage to slide over so we may be on our merry way. But alas, twas not to be. Our hand luggage comes through the curtain, shimmies along the conveyor belt and then! It suddenly shifts backwards onto another conveyor belt and ends up in what I shall melodramatically term 'the valley of suspicion'.



A man says someone will be with us shortly, as my mother and I begin to question everything in our hand luggage - wondering if a packet of wet wipes or a nail file might be deemed criminal. The security lady begins walking towards us at what felt like a snail's pace at the time and, looking in objective retrospect, what actually was a snail's pace.


I had taken off my Pandora rings (so they wouldn't beep under the metal detector) and placed them in the tray with our hand luggage. Of course, rings are small and easily lost so my mum decided to fish them out of the tray so they wouldn't get misplaced. The lady says "madame, please leave everything in the tray until I have finished checking it". After mum explained she was concerned they'd get lost, the lady suddenly acquired an American twang and with CSI-style delivery assures us that "madame, ain't nothing getting out of that tray".

The tray is scanned again and it flags up my camera bag. The woman, still keeping her American-TV-cop vibe going asks me the usual questions. Did you pack this bag yourself? Yes. Are there are any sharp objects in here? No. Have you left it unattended at any point? No. She opens the bag as I begin questioning everything I've just said. Maybe my Lotso plush came alive in the night and is back to his villainous ways. More realistically, maybe I did leave it unattended and had just forgotten. At this point, we still had passport control to get through and this all seemed to be progressing at a far too leisurely pace. Will we make it to our train on time? Who knows!

Next she takes my camera out of its bag and unceremoniously plonks it on a smaller tray, upside down - which rather distressed me as I would prefer my camera to be cradled like a fragile newborn kitten. It is scanned for explosives, found to be safe and we are on our way. Passport control has its usual air of solemnity, the escalator to the platform sees its usual scuffle of people all rushing to get to their pre-assigned seat first and we sit down, settled, for our Eurostar journey. This story, however, was nothing compared to disaster #2...

Thanks for reading! Second (and more disastrous) disaster tale coming soon!

Paris out 💃 xxx
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