Boundless Horizons

Pre-Trip Planning

Background

When we were planning our 2023 trips, we realised that for roughly the same cost of going back to Walt Disney World, we could instead do a Mediterranean DCL cruise and get Disneyland Paris annual passes. Since the DLP passes run until August 2024, we knew that our 2024 trip planning would revolve around those.

One of the things we really loved about last year’s cruise was seeing new places – my eternal dilemma is that I love the Disney parks, but I also want to see the world. Sitting in Marne–la–Vallée – Chessy station waiting to take the train to the airport, I realised that there are so many places that are just a train ride away from DLP! We took advantage of that to explore the Bordeaux region in September 2023 (a subject for a future blog post), so we wanted to see where else we could go.

Thinking about places with a Disney connection, we decided to visit the real life Matterhorn! We’ve ridden the Matterhorn Bobsleds in Disneyland Anaheim, and it features in Soarin’ at Epcot, so it definitely fit the brief. There’s a great overview of Walt’s connection to the Matterhorn on the Gornergrat website.

The closest town to the Matterhorn is Zermatt, so that formed the basis of our plans. The town is featured in the Disney film Third Man on the Mountain which we watched as part of our planning. From there we just had to work out how we would get to Zermatt, and how we’d get from there to Disneyland Paris by train.

Pre-Trip Prep

Looking at our options for getting to Zermatt, the best route was to fly into Geneva and take a train from there, with a change in Visp. Flying out on a Tuesday, we decided to add a night in Geneva to give us a chance to see the city, before spending Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights in Zermatt to give us two full days in the town.

From Zermatt to Disneyland Paris involved changing trains in Visp, Basel, and Strasbourg. To break up the journey, we added two nights in Strasbourg to spend the weekend there.

Strasbourg to Disneyland Paris is a direct train, so that was easy to plan! We decided to end the trip with three nights there. This would be our tenth visit to DLP overall, and our sixth in the year since we bought annual passes, so we had a good idea of how we wanted to spend our time there. We knew we’d arrive lunchtime on Monday, and we were flying back late on Thursday so we’d have two full days and two half days in the parks.

Itinerary

• Day 1 – Geneva
• Days 2-4 – Zermatt
• Days 5-6 – Strasbourg
• Days 7-10 – Disneyland Paris

With flights, hotels, and trains booked, and a rough outline of our days planned, we were ready to go!