Forums Closed
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As of January 1, 2019, we have closed our forums. This is a decision we did not come to lightly, but it is necessary. The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk. The server software itself must be updated, and it cannot be without removing the forums.
So it is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our long-running forums. They came online in 2000 and brought together so many wonderful Disney fans. We had friendships form, careers launch, couples marry, children born ... all because of this amazing community.
Thank you to each of you who were a part of this community. You made it possible.
And a very special thank you to our Guides (moderators), past and present, who kept our forums a happy place to be. You are the glue that held everything together, and we are forever grateful to you. Thank you aliceinwdw, Caldercup, MrsM, WillCAD, Fortissimo, GingerJ, HiddenMickey, CRCrazy, Eeyoresmom, disneyknut, disneydani, Cam22, chezp, WDWfan, Luvsun, KMB733, rescuesk, OhToodles!, Colexis Mom, lfredsbo, HiddenMickey, DrDolphin, DopeyGirl, duck addict, Disneybine, PixieMichele, Sandra Bostwick, Eeyore Tattoo, DyanKJ130, Suzy Q'Disney, LilMarcieMouse, AllisonG, Belle*, Chrissi, Brant, DawnDenise, Crystalloubear, Disneymom9092, FanOfMickey, Goofy4Goofy, GoofyMom, Home4us123, iamgrumpy, ilovedisney247, Jennifer2003, Jenny Pooh, KrisLuvsDisney, Ladyt, Laughaholic88, LauraBelle Hime, Lilianna, LizardCop, Loobyoxlip, lukeandbrooksmom, marisag, michnash, MickeyMAC, OffKilter_Lynn, PamelaK, Poor_Eeyore, ripkensnana, RobDVC, SHEANA1226, Shell of the South, snoozin, Statelady01, Tara O'Hara, tigger22, Tink and Co., Tinkerbelz, WDWJAMBA, wdwlovers, Wendyismyname, whoSEZ, WildforWD, and WvuGrrrl. You made the magic.
We want to personally thank Sara Varney, who coordinated our community for many years (among so many other things she did for us), and Cheryl Pendry, our Message Board Manager who helped train our Guides, and Ginger Jabour, who helped us with the PassPorter-specific forums and Live! Guides. Thank you for your time, energy, and enthusiasm. You made it all happen.
There are other changes as well.
Why? Well, the world has changed. And change with it, we must. The lyrics to "We Go On" for IllumiNations say it best:
We go on to the joy and through the tears
We go on to discover new frontiers
Moving on with the current of the years.
We go on
Moving forward now as one
Moving on with a spirit born to run
Ever on with each rising sun.
To a new day, we go on.
It's time to move on and move forward.
PassPorter is a small business, and for many years it supported our family. But the world changed, print books took a backseat to the Internet, and for a long time now it has been unable to make ends meet. We've had to find new ways to support our family, which means new careers and less and less time available to devote to our first baby, PassPorter.
But eventually, we must move on and move forward. It is the right thing to do.
So we are retiring this newsletter, as we simply cannot keep up with it. Many thanks to Mouse Fan Travel who supported it all these years, to All Ears and MousePlanet who helped us with news, to our many article contributors, and -- most importantly -- to Sara Varney who edited our newsletter so wonderfully for years and years.
And we are no longer charging for the Live Guides. If you have a subscription, it's yours to keep for the lifetime of the Live Guides at no additional cost. The Live Guides will stay online, barring server issues and technical problems, for all of 2019.
That said, PassPorter is not going away. Most of the resources will remain online for as long as we can support them, and after that we will find ways to make whatever we can available. PassPorter means a great deal to us, and to many of you, and we will do our best to keep it alive in whatever way we can. Our server costs are high, and they'll need to come out of our pockets, so in the future you can expect some changes so we can bring those costs down.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for your amazing support over the years. Without you, there's no way us little guys could have made something like this happen and given the "big guys" a run for their money. PassPorter was consistently the #3 guidebook after the Unofficial and Official guides, which was really unheard of for such a small company to do. We ROCKED it thanks to you and your support and love!
If you miss us, you can still find some of us online. Sara started a new blog at DisneyParkPrincess.com -- I strongly urge you to visit and get on her mailing list. She IS the Disney park princess and knows Disney backward and forward. And I am blogging as well at JenniferMaker.com, which is a little craft blog I started a couple of years ago to make ends meet. You can see and hear me in my craft show at https://www.youtube.com/c/jennifermaker . Many PassPorter readers and fans are on Facebook, in groups they formed like the PassPorter Trip Reports and PassPorter Crafting Challenge (if you join, just let them know you read about it in the newsletter). And some of our most devoted community members started a forum of their own at Pixie Dust Lane and all are invited over.
So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
Best wishes for a wonderful and magical new year!
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Welcome! We're happy you've found the PassPorter Community -- the friendliest place to plan your vacation to Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Disneyland, and the world in general! You are now viewing the PassPorter Message Board Community as a guest, which gives you limited access. As our guest, feel free to browse our messages by selecting the forum you want to visit from the list below.
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04-08-2006, 01:43 PM
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#1
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PassPorter Message Board Manager
 PassPorter Guide Author
Community Rank: Legend VIP 
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Maidstone, Kent, UK
Concierge Level: 3
Posts: 190,285
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Two go wild and go west! THREAD ONE COMPLETE
Welcome to my trip report for our Vegas and California trip! [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/zwavin.gif[/img]
As this will cover a number of different places, I'm going to post the Vegas, Lake Havasu City and San Francisco parts here in the Globetrotting forum. The San Diego and Disneyland / Los Angeles parts will go into the Disneyland trip report forum.
The pre-trip report starts here. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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04-08-2006, 01:43 PM
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#2
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PassPorter Message Board Manager
PassPorter Guide Author
Community Rank: Legend VIP
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Maidstone, Kent, UK
Concierge Level: 3
Posts: 190,285
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Pre-trip report – part one: from one vacation to the next!
They say the best way to conclude a Disney vacation is by having the next one planned. I have always had to do things differently, so I decided that the best way to start our Disney vacation was by planning the next one.
But first, we need to back track a bit to how this vacation started. I think, if I’m honest, this trip has been about three years in the making. Originally, 2005 was to be the year of our big three week vacation for Mark’s 40th birthday, taking in Boston to go whale watching, Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles and Disneyland’s 50th celebrations, San Francisco or San Diego and Washington DC. He was particularly keen to see the Grand Canyon and Vegas and I couldn’t miss Disneyland. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] It soon became apparent that getting three weeks off work in the fall of 2005 was going to be like mission impossible, so we amended our plans. We’d still do everything we planned – just in two separate vacations and we could take in a trip to Disney World as well. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/waytogo.gif[/img]
So we booked our MouseFest trip, which started in Boston and ended in DC and then decided that we’d head to the West Coast in spring 2006 for two weeks. I spent ages playing with dates for flights, different combinations of itineraries, flights between each stop, driving between each stop and eventually what emerged was that the cheapest day to fly out was on Good Friday. I debated between flying into San Francisco or Las Vegas and then plugged in some dates for accommodation and wouldn’t you know it? The rates around Easter were the cheapest that I found throughout March, April or May. That was decided then – start with Vegas.
I had a vague idea in my mind to try and take in San Diego, then Los Angeles and finally San Francisco, so I worked out which day we’d be flying back home and at least the first part of the puzzle was falling into place.
It was Thursday 24 November, otherwise known as Thanksgiving for many of you, but for me, it was known as “the day before we headed off to Boston, Disney and DC”. I spent my lunch hour on the phone to a travel agent, booking those flights for our California and Vegas trip, having cleared the time off the day before. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/woot.gif[/img] Why the rush you wonder? Couldn’t I have just sorted it all out when I got back? Well, yes, but I was planning on using our DVC points to pay for most of our stay and I figured that if I booked the flights before we left, then at least I could sort out the accommodation while we were in Disney and the call wouldn’t cost anything. Smart, eh? [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] And hey, at least I’d have something to look forward when we got back to the UK…
Fast forward to ten days into our vacation and I was calling Member Services from our room at the Beach Club Villas [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/thewave.gif[/img] and booking our accommodation for most of the trip. First, the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego for two nights, then the Disneyland Hotel for five nights, then the Fairmont in San Francisco for four nights. Sorted… or was it?
It was only when we’d been home for a few days and I got all the confirmations and compared them to our flight details that I realised we had a problem. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/eek.gif[/img] It seems that we were booked to stay in San Francisco from 26 – 30 April and according to the travel details for our flights, we were coming home on 29 April. Uh-oh… something isn’t right here. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/whistling2.gif[/img] I guess the lesson here is to take the details of your flights to Florida with you so that you’ve got them when you’re calling Member Services. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/blushing.gif[/img]
A quick call to Member Services and we changed our San Francisco dates to 25 – 29 April, unfortunately having to shell out another $75 to change the reservation in the process. That was a lesson learnt the hard way. If you’re using your DVC points to pay for a hotel in the Concierge Collection, get the dates right! [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/082502yes_prv.gif[/img] Any chance will incur a $75 fee. I cut a night off our stay at the Disneyland Hotel and fortunately there wasn’t a fee for doing that.
I did also enquire about upgrading to the Grand Californian, as there was a new deal, meaning it wouldn’t cost as many points to stay there that I hadn’t known about when I made the original booking. That was a no-go. There was availability over the weekend, but nothing on the Friday or Monday, so I guess they were full with conference goers.
All this before Christmas as well. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/waytogo.gif[/img] Well, as we know, Christmas is always an expensive time of the year – and it proved to be the case for us, but mainly because I kept purchasing additional extras for this trip! The first extra was the tickets for Disneyland. I happened to be on the official website, checking out how much we’d have to budget for our tickets, when I saw an offer that ran until 27 April – everyone plays for the kids’ price. It meant that adults could get their tickets for the price of the kids’ tickets, so I didn’t need to do any more thinking about how many days worth of park admission we wanted, I just went for the five day option. It cost us $149 for each ticket, a total saving for the two of us of $140! [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/waytogo.gif[/img]
You have to understand that over Christmas, we had snow and I was bored, but on the same day, I also started looking at Cirque du Soleil’s website and discovered that, three and a half months out, most of the decent tickets for their “O” show (the under and above water one) had already gone. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/eek.gif[/img] I really hadn’t expected that, so it was panic stations – we needed to buy tickets for the night we wanted and quickly, before the thing sold out. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/082502yes_prv.gif[/img] I asked some questions on the boards about which were good seats, got some great advice [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/thanx.gif[/img] and phoned up to try and get the seats I wanted. While I was on the phone, I also asked about Zumanity (the show for over 18’s only), as I knew from the website that there were still front row seats available for that. I wasn’t going to miss out on those [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/082502no_prv.gif[/img] so I booked those on the same phone call. I half expected the card to be refused, it had received such a bashing in about 48 hours, but it all went through fine. Now just how to pay for all this, as I wasn’t planning on buying any of this for another month or two… [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/whistling2.gif[/img]
A quick visit to the Southwest website, a good fare on offer for flights from Los Angeles (Santa Ana, not LAX [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/waytogo.gif[/img] ) and that was booked as well, so we were sorted on how we’d get from there to San Francisco. I didn’t fancy the idea of driving, but until someone told me that you can only get flights with Southwest through their website and not through a travel agent, I was despairing, as the prices with other airlines were crazy, so many [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/thanx.gif[/img] to whoever it was who tipped me off about that. You saved us a lot of heartache there. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/082502yes_prv.gif[/img]
Next: a cheaper way to stay in Vegas! [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]
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04-08-2006, 02:20 PM
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#3
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Community Rank: Legend Extraordinaire 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ohio Football Hall Of Fame
Posts: 42,304
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
I am so excited!!!!!! Another Cheryl trip report!!!!!!! Great start!!! Can't wait for more!!!!
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Sponsored links
 | | PassPorter's Free-Book to Walt Disney World
It’s hard to believe anything is free at Walt Disney World; but there are actually a number of things you can get or do for little to no cost. This e-book documents over 200 free or cheap tips to do before you go and after you arrive. You could save a considerable amount of money following these tips. Perhaps more importantly; you can discover overlooked attractions and little-known details most people whiz by on their way to spend money. Click here to see free sample pages from the e-book!
Get this popular e-book free of extra charges when you join the PassPorter's Club for as little as $4.95. A club pass includes access to all our other e-books; e-worksheets; super-size photos; and more! This e-book is also available for separate purchase in the PassPorter Online Store for just $5.95. |
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04-08-2006, 03:26 PM
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#4
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Community Rank: Explorer 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: second star to the right
Posts: 13,308
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Yipee!! Can't wait to here more. Oh wait, first you have to go on the trip. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] Won't be much longer now!
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04-08-2006, 06:00 PM
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#5
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Community Rank: Explorer
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Longfellow's "Jewel by the Sea"
Posts: 14,165
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Ha! I know all about those credit card bash-fests. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/082502yes_prv.gif[/img] This is great, Chez, I'm looking forward to your Las Vegas experience, and what you think of Zumanity!
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04-08-2006, 06:11 PM
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#6
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Tulsa, OK
Concierge Level: 6
Posts: 21,627
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
I'm so glad you started your trip report. I love reading your reports.
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04-08-2006, 06:30 PM
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#7
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Living Seas wannabe
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Concierge Level: 6
Posts: 31,940
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Yeah!!! I have been waiting for this TR to start!! I can not wait to read all about it - especially the shows in Vegas!!!
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04-08-2006, 07:48 PM
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#8
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Community Rank: Globetrotter 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: South Dakota
Posts: 3,294
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Wow, what a beginning already, and it's only pre-trip report. [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/woot.gif[/img] [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/woot.gif[/img]
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04-08-2006, 09:47 PM
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#9
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Community Rank: Jetsetter 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Wishing I was at WDW
Posts: 2,384
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Great start! It sounds like such a wonderful trip!
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04-08-2006, 11:31 PM
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#10
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Batman's Gal/Mickey's Pal
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Owensboro, KY USA
Concierge Level: 6
Posts: 95,254
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
So exciting to read about your planning adventures! Can't wait for Vegas!
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04-08-2006, 11:44 PM
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#11
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Community Rank: Explorer
Join Date: May 2002
Location: Fort Smith, Arkansas
Posts: 10,721
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Yay, it's kinda cool reading about a trip report one knows she might make her way into!!
Great start and cant wait to see ya soon!
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04-09-2006, 02:59 AM
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#12
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PassPorter Message Board Manager
PassPorter Guide Author
Community Rank: Legend VIP
Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: Maidstone, Kent, UK
Concierge Level: 3
Posts: 190,285
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
[ QUOTE ]
Yay, it's kinda cool reading about a trip report one knows she might make her way into!!
[/ QUOTE ]
might make her way into - if we're spending three days together, I don't know how you're going to avoid being in it! [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/roflmao.gif[/img]
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Sponsored links
| | PassPorter's Free-Book to Walt Disney World
It’s hard to believe anything is free at Walt Disney World; but there are actually a number of things you can get or do for little to no cost. This e-book documents over 200 free or cheap tips to do before you go and after you arrive. You could save a considerable amount of money following these tips. Perhaps more importantly; you can discover overlooked attractions and little-known details most people whiz by on their way to spend money. Click here to see free sample pages from the e-book!
Get this popular e-book free of extra charges when you join the PassPorter's Club for as little as $4.95. A club pass includes access to all our other e-books; e-worksheets; super-size photos; and more! This e-book is also available for separate purchase in the PassPorter Online Store for just $5.95. |
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04-09-2006, 03:13 AM
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#13
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Community Rank: Globetrotter
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Manchester, England
Posts: 3,595
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
I'm sure you'll have an amazing trip - can't wait to read more!!!
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04-09-2006, 07:41 AM
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#14
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RED SOX NATION!!
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Connecticut
Concierge Level: 9
Posts: 136,854
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
What a great start Cheryl [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/zwavin.gif[/img] More please [img]/ubb/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]
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04-09-2006, 01:29 PM
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#15
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Living Seas wannabe
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Concierge Level: 6
Posts: 31,940
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Re: Two go wild and go west!
Great beginning to what sounds like a great trip!!
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Sponsored links
| | PassPorter's Free-Book to Walt Disney World
It’s hard to believe anything is free at Walt Disney World; but there are actually a number of things you can get or do for little to no cost. This e-book documents over 200 free or cheap tips to do before you go and after you arrive. You could save a considerable amount of money following these tips. Perhaps more importantly; you can discover overlooked attractions and little-known details most people whiz by on their way to spend money. Click here to see free sample pages from the e-book!
Get this popular e-book free of extra charges when you join the PassPorter's Club for as little as $4.95. A club pass includes access to all our other e-books; e-worksheets; super-size photos; and more! This e-book is also available for separate purchase in the PassPorter Online Store for just $5.95. |
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