If there's anything more likely to make my skin shrivel and my brain compress in horror than a trip to Disneyland Resort Paris, I've yet to come across it. Waking up to find Jade Goody in my bed might result in some shrivelling and so might being made to stand in a tank that's slowly filling with water while spiders are dropped on my head at the same time as being forced to eat live bugs and pretend that I'm some sort of celebrity. My repulsion to cheese and fish all give me the heebie-jeebies and therefore trying to find a restaurant I can eat in in Boston, Massachusetts, provides me with a brain-compressing headache unless I choose to spend my time there eating at McDonalds or Burger King.

But I think I'd rather do all of these things, simultaneously, than endure the frightfully sickening overgrown theme park that blots the landscape just a few miles east of Paris. So when my six-year-old son suggested that this is where we should spend our family holiday, and my wife agreed with him, my skin pulled so tight over my body it gave me an appearance that Joan Collins' plastic surgeon would have been proud of.

The first Disney theme park blotted the landscape of this great globe as far back as 1955, when Disneyland appeared in California. Although Walt Disney stated that Disneyland would never be finished as long as there was imagination left in the world, planning permission, land ownership and general bureaucracy got in the way of dreams and aspirations and so a new theme park was built in Orlando, Florida, and named Walt Disney World. This park opened in 1971 and is still, to this day, the *only* Disney park you should ever consider visiting. The park continues to grow, develop, improve and literally go beyond anything you would ever have thought possible, and Disney World is now made up of a multitude of smaller parks that you would struggle to complete in a normal two-week family holiday. Presumably thinking that he could take over the world before Bill Gates did, Disney went on to open a theme park in Tokyo, Japan, in 1983 and it wasn't long before Europe got hit with the Disney sledgehammer too - Disneyland Resort Paris opened its doors to the public on 12th April 1992.

Originally called EuroDisney, the park attracted more than eleven million visitors in its first year but failed to perform financially. Bad management, poor financial decisions and a woeful public image blighted it, and in the late nineties a decision was made to rebrand to Disneyland Resort Paris and the company heaped mighty finds in to the coffers to help grow the park's reputation in Europe, with the addition of the Walt Disney Studios park next door earlier this decade.

Getting to the Disney park in Paris is relatively straight forward. Flights run regularly into Charles de Gaulle airport, where shuttle buses and taxi drivers wait eagerly to run you to your destination, the EuroStar train service will whisk you from London straight to the park itself, or you can simply load your car up and drive. Ferry services and the EuroTunnel run frequently and shopping around will dig up cheap deals to get you on to the European mainland. With petrol and, more especially, diesel prices being cheaper in France than here in England, a good deal on a crossing will significantly keep your costs lower than flying or using the train. From Calais to the Disney park takes roughly three hours using France's motorways, which are excellent, and the tolls for using these roads will cost you roughly eighteen euros each way; or you can choose to meander through the countryside, avoiding the toll motorways and treating yourself to views across France's lovely scenery, but this will add time to your journey.

Accommodation at Disney is plentiful and if you stay in one of the company's hotels (separate review to come) access to the park itself is included in your stay. Each hotel has ample parking and even the cheapest - the Cheyenne and the Santa Fe - are no more than a brisk ten minute walk from the park alongside a pretty river.

Now we've stayed at Disney several times, despite my protestations, and this time we travelled in late November. If you're not put off by the weather, which can be cold and wet (statistically, Paris has more rainfall per annum than London), it is undoubtedly the best time to go. On weekdays the park is relatively quiet and the average queuing time for rides is just five minutes, unlike mid-summer, when you can start queuing for Space Mountain in June and eventually get on to your ride in late September. Disney does have a FastPass system, basically a queue-jumping facility afforded to hotel guests and those who wish to pay for it, and I found it mildly amusing to watch people using this during the quiet and rainy season. When enough people start using this system, eventually their queue stretches longer than that of the paupers who couldn't be bothered to try.

Disneyland Resort Paris is made up of four key areas, all initially accessed from Main Street USA, which is a period street made of shops, boutiques and grossly overpriced hot dog sellers. Go at this time of year, when the Christmas decorations are up, and every half an hour it will actually snow in Main Street. From there, choose your destination - Discoveryland, Frontierland, Fantasyland or Adventureland. Each 'Land' is themed in its own style - for example, Frontierland is a picture-perfect rendition of the old Wild West - and each has its share of rides for the big and small, merchandise shops that will happily sell you a Disney cap for £15 or a souvenir cup for a tenner, and appropriately themed restaurants that will do you a Hot Dog, Chips, soft drink and cake for three times the price of a McDonalds' Big Mac meal.

To review each ride here would take up too much space, but if you visit make sure you get on Space Mountain (an excellent roller-coaster in the dark), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril (a runaway-train roller-coaster that goes backwards), Star Tours (a realistic simulation ride that will take you to the far side of the galaxy with C-3PO and R2-D2), and - our family favourite - Buzz Lightyear's Lazer Blast (a slow-moving roller-coaster shoot-them-up where you actually shoot the bad guys).

Avoid, like the plague, It's A Small World (it's just too sickly to be true, although we went on it three times in one day just to get out of the rain), Dumbo's Flying Ride (your kids'll get hold of the lever and simply hold you at the highest height so that you suffer vertigo as well as a dizzying sickness), and The Pirates of the Caribbean ride (possibly the only log flume in the world that you don't actually get wet on).

Your access pass will also get you into the neighbouring Disney Studios park, where you can go on rides that are both exhilarating and informative - you get to see how they make the special effects in movies such as Armageddon while experiencing it as if you were really part of the whole adventure. The *Moteurs Action* experience is a thrilling stunt show that also shows you how the stunts are done, and the Studio Action Tour takes you around a film lot where you'll be attacked by Jaws, stalked by a pterodactyl and finished off in a blaze of glory caused by an earthquake. A lot of construction work is going on in this park at the moment with several new rides - including one based on this year's Disney success, Cars - due to open by summer 2007.

It's worth noting that travelling in the low season might mean that certain rides are closed for refurbishment, but you can't grumble as the prices are more attractive and for a park that's open every day of the year except Christmas, when else are they going to do the maintenance work?

Keeping your stomach full during your visit to Disneyland Resort Paris isn't difficult, but it is absurdly expensive. You can eat on site, in one of the hotels, or at the several non-Disney restaurants that are in the accompanying Disney Village, a strip located amidst all the hotels and both parks that offers yet more shopping opportunities for the same stuff you can buy in your local Disney Store and such culinary starlets as Planet Hollywood and The Rainforest Café. There's a multiscreen cinema and an IMAX there, too, and I would heartily recommend Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show - it might be expensive but it's a hugely entertaining Wild West bonanza while you eat your food.

Wherever you eat, be it Café Mickey, Planet Hollywood, or the hotel restaurant, a family of four is likely to see an average meal, including drinks, set them back over one hundred euros (about £70.00) and a pint of Carlsberg in your hotel will cost you €8 (that's £5.38 in real money)! Feeding your family for five days won't be cheap.

Throughout your visit you'll get plenty of opportunity to see the Disney characters, which traipse around the park and set up shop in different locations in order to be photographed and sign autographs. Various restaurants in the hotels, the Village and around the park also offer Character Breakfast/Lunch opportunities, where Disney's stars will join you for your meal. Despite all this, it never ceases to amaze me how parents appear shocked when they shove their precious three-year-old in front of a six-foot mouse with dinner-plate sized ears only to find that the terrified little one bursts in to tears.

All around you, the 'cast' of Disney - the staff, the cleaners, the waiters and waitresses, the ride managers, the hoteliers - all beam radiant smiles that are as fixed and painted as any that Mickey Mouse could muster and the air is filled with the sickly-sweet sound of Disney themes and choreography. Depending on the time of year, two or three parades dominate the route from Main Street USA to the castle, each blasting up-tempo tunes, fantastic lights and plenty of carnival floats gleefully showing off all the characters from the various Disney films. They are truly worth seeing, if perhaps a touch sycophantic.

If you've never been to a Disney before, then this is as much a veritable fantasy as any; but if you've hit Disney World in Florida then Disneyland Paris is a large disappointment - it's more Alton Towers with famous faces. Your euros would be better spent on a day at Parc Asterix, France's answer to Disney, located 45 minutes north of Paris.

I've promised my wife that the next Disney trip, because there undoubtedly will be (she has Winnie The Pooh tattooed on her shoulder, for crying out loud), will be to Florida. I've been there before; she hasn't. We've done Disneyland Resort Paris to death and I'd rather floss my teeth on Edwina Currie's g-string than visit there again, but should you choose to spend your next holiday there then I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

Just remember that Minnie Mouse is really a semi-retired 80-year-old Frenchman with hairy legs dressed up in a pretty girl's costume.