Puy du Fou is an awesome theme park where there are about 10 different shows and villages that you walk through. We camped in the aire de service attached to the park for 6E a night for three nights. We managed to see every show once and went all our favorites twice.

When we were in Paris we saw pictures and advertisements for Puy Du Fou everywhere. When I looked it up online, the most common comment was “this is awesome” followed by “this is a theme park without rides, something that would never fly in the US.” Though I can think of at least two theme parks without rides that are similar but smaller in the Edmonton area, Fort Edmonton which I really like and The Ukrainian Village – so that last comment isn’t really fair. Additionally the staff of Fort Edmonton are in character and I am told the Ukrainian Village staff are even better but haven’t ever been. We decided to make a visit to Puy du Fou a priority for our camping trip so after Mont. St. Michel we headed there with a stop about halfway at Municipal de Vigneux campground.

Puy du Fou started as a show called Cinéscénie which is staffed by all community volunteers, has about 1200 cast members and 24,000 costumes. There are two shows per week and every show has been sold out in every season after the first year which was in the 1978. We weren’t able to go to this show but we would hear the fireworks at night. The rest of the park opened later in 1989.

We spent all of our time in the 1989 park and it was great. There are three or four different villages each from a different era of history. The shows are all themed to the village they are in and the sets are all outside except for the Musketeer show. In each village there are educational interactive displays where you see people working and doing traditional tasks. Most of the villages will have food available too; though sometimes it was hard to find Canadian kid friendly stuff. As in all theme parks getting good value for food was impossible but you suck it up as part of the experience.

Hitting the park for a re-charge

That’s a big pig. Even better was the piglets wrestling to get milk from momma.

Not quite Disney animatronics but entertaining too.

Ethan never got the courage up in time to get in the water before it turned off. He wasn’t real happy about it either.

Fancy a pint?

Different bread types and shapes.

We had 3 day tickets which is 1 day more than he average visit so we had a lot of time to take things in and not over tax ourselves; is this a theme for Viatorian trips? Yep! We would get up and have breakfast, then walk about a mile to the park gates. There was a bus but we never found a schedule and likely we missed all the morning pickups because we would have a chill morning. We would hit a few shows, have lunch and then hit a few more before we would head back to the camper car. The last mile walking back to the camper car was always the longest and Ethan would occasionally get a ride on either my back or Leah’s back.

All the shows are in French and headphones are available but usually we could piece together the story between our poor french and the acting of the show.

After three days we were completely wasted and headed north for a chill day before dropping off the camper car and heading back to Paris.