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Published: December 15th 2016
On the first day of our holiday we'd left home by 7:30am and flew out of Sydney Airport around midday after some minor frustrations and delays in the morning. We had a very successful 9 hour flight to Hong Kong. Poor Roman looks pretty banged up with scratches & scabs on his nose and forehead after his spectacular fall the night before we flew out.
Nick & Alicia had been hoping for a good easy leg of travel for the kids (Lucy 5.5 and Roman 3.5) and sure enough with lunch, dinner, the odd trips to visit Grandma & Grandpa in the seats in front of us, a good deal of movies, and some gaming on their tablets the kids got through the flight without a hitch.
Nick was horrified during the flight when upon ordering a beer the hostess tried to leave me a VB(!!!) I managed to arrest her in time to repair the error and didn't sully my hands by touching it.
Nick even managed to get through two good movies in relative peace which is more movies than I've watched in the last two months.....
Our delightful children fell apart on arrival in
Hong Kong (after 11pm on their body clocks so fair enough) which turns out to be a neat trick to shortcut customs lines. Their weeping led to local staff short cutting us through the lines and savings us 25+ minutes of queuing. Presumably they don't like to have all the other people in line having to suffer kids tantrums.
Our transfer to the hotel was fine and we were all asleep by about 00:30 based on our Sydney body clocks.
The next day after some weird 'morning body-clock vs pitch darkness outside + fatigue' we all rallied and set off via the excellent Hong Kong Metro system to Disneyland. On the way to the Metro station we enjoyed the extraordinary Christmas decorations everywhere in the up market shopping mall; whether at the mall, airport, or our hotel Hong Kong has beautiful high production values in their Christmas decorations. We made it to the train with minimal fuss and we were amused to find the Disney train had it's windows cut in Mickey Mouse ear shapes.
Despite our kids knowing very little about Mickey Mouse they seemed pretty happy to see his statues upon arrival. Lucy
wasn't as excited about the famous Disney Sleeping Beauty Princess castle (the one modelled on Neuschwanstein castle) than we would have thought
Disneyland in Hong Kong seems heavily targeted at children with very few rides being teenager friendly thrill type rides. Lucy & Roman had dozens of options and we rode them all with fairly minimal lines.
Rides that go around with a lever the kids can control the height of the vehicle i.e. Dumbo and Flying Saucers were favourites. The excellent and huge Carousel, Spinning Teacups, and Buzz Light Year laser rides were all good value too.
A river rafting ride that featured animatronic Elephants, Crocodiles, Hippos, Giraffes, and Head Hunters was popular too
The famous 'It's a Small World' ride was excellent with huge amounts of things to see and was easily the pick of the bunch. Other highlights included the Grand Parade and Lion King theatre show which was similar to the theatre version of the show but compressed to only 40 or so minutes.
We finished the day with a shower of snow (soap bubbles cunningly blown from the roofs of Main street onto the crowds) in front of a massively
tall Christmas tree and a quick bite of noodles before escaping Disney direct to the airport. In summary Disney was a definite winner and we all enjoyed it.
We were now to the part of the trip Nick had been dreading for months: taking extremely exhausted kids and then finding a way to get them through an airport after 20:30 local time and then to sleep for as many hours as we possibly could on the 13 hour flight to Paris.
With a quick water fight in the hotel fountain before collecting all our bags and heading to the airport the kids actually rallied long enough to get them through customs before they literally fell asleep in our arms with minimal hysteria. We were able to dump their comatose bodies onto airport gate lounge chairs successfully where they slept happily without moving a muscle for 2 hours before the flight left.
After straining to carry our sleeping children onto the plane without waking them, we got them buckled in and flown away and Alicia and I were terribly pleased to have two heavily asleep children with a night flight ahead of us. After determining the
kids were unwakeable we both settled down and managed to grab 4-5 hours of sleep ourselves which certainly took the edge off the 13 hour flight and made it bearable.
Next blog entry will cover Paris - you need to scroll down to see the additional photos for this entry.
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Anne
non-member comment
Great blog
Great blog keep it up