Halloween, Hawaii and holiday celebrations - the Hawaii section THIS SECTION COMPLETED 1/13 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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!
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For those joining afresh, you join us at the start of the day, having spent the night at the Hyatt at Orlando International Airport....
Monday 4 November – part one: now where are my Texan cows?
By the time the alarm went off at 4:15am, I think it’s fair to say we’d both had a pretty poor night’s sleep. I don’t think that was really down to the Hyatt, as the bed was comfortable enough – I think it had more to do with us being paranoid about sleeping through the alarm, or it not going off (last time we stayed here, we didn’t get the wake-up call we asked for, and it was pure luck we’d set our cell phones too! )
We got going very slowly, and I have to say I really wasn’t feeling at all well. We’d asked for help with our luggage, a service the Hyatt offers that we’d used last time, and the guy was promptly there at 4:45am, and down we headed. It was quite a walk to the American Airlines check-in, so we were glad to have him, and not have to negotiate our way across the carpeted terminal (very nice, but not practical for suitcases… ) with our cases.
We used the self service check-in, with a helpful employee doing it all for us, although the machine ran out of paper halfway through doing our boarding passes, so we had to go to see someone else, but he quickly got it all sorted out.
Then it was through security, where we just walked up to the TSA agent, had our passports swiped through, then we only had one person in front of us at the actual security check. I think the whole thing start to finish took no more than five minutes.
We took the monorail over to the terminal, found our gate, and settled down, and honestly it was about 5:05am when we took our seats. That’s right, from leaving our room, it had taken just 20 minutes to get here. As Mark said, we could’ve had more time in bed, but you just know if we had, then it would’ve taken us a lot longer to get here.
I have to say here that the whole airport was really hot, and that wasn’t helping me. I just felt awful, exceptionally tired, and at points I really felt like I could just pass out at any moment, but once Mark got me some water, I did start to feel a bit better thankfully. As the time passed by, I cooled down considerably, and was starting to feel human by the time it got to boarding.
We were one of the last groups to board, and by the time we got on, there wasn’t much space left for luggage, but thankfully the space underneath the seats was massive, so my hand luggage went in there, and we found enough space for Mark’s to go in the overhead compartment.
I went to take some photos when we took off, but got a bit of a shock when the camera told me that it didn’t have a memory stick in it. It seems I’d managed to leave it in the computer when I downloaded my photos last night. Oh well, no photos then, as the laptop was buried under the seat in front, and I wasn’t going to try and get to it during takeoff. In fairness, we were soon in the clouds, so there wasn’t that much to see.
I can’t honestly tell you much about the two and a half hour flight, as we both spent the vast majority of it sleeping, as we were both still shattered. We did manage to eat breakfast, and for me, that was a major victory, as earlier the prospect of food was just appalling to me, sharing a cinnamon roll and a chocolate muffin. As Mark said, once we’d had that, and a cup of tea, we both started to feel human again.
We touched down on time in Dallas Fort Worth, and by now I had loaded the memory stick into my camera, so I got plenty of photos as we came down.
My goodness, this place just seems to sprawl for miles, certainly as far as the eye can see anyway. Still no Texan cow sightings – good grief, this is twice in Texas in two trips, and no bovine buddies to greet me? What is the world coming to?
It was really interesting to come into this airport, as it’s one of the main hubs of American Airlines, so of course their planes were everywhere. It seems to be a fairly modern airport – well that’s certainly the impression I got when we got off the plane, and into the terminal building…
This was one of the first signs we saw in the terminal building!
We followed the signs to the Skylink train, which does appear to be a more modern addition to the airport, and very convenient it is too. It literally runs every minute, so when one arrived, I took the opportunity to get some photos, and we just got the next one. I really liked the Skylink station, although it could’ve done with being fully enclosed, as when the Skylink pulled in, you could feel how cold it was outside – and it was in the high 50s, which was a heck of a shock to our systems after the Florida weather.
Woohoo I'm so excited for this part of the TR! One of my old Y&B friends works at Aulani now so I can't wait to hear about it from a guest perspective Welcome to DFW The American Terminals are far nicer than the other ones at our airport lol... Hopefully you didn't end up switching to a yucky one for the second leg!
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Woohoo I'm so excited for this part of the TR! One of my old Y&B friends works at Aulani now so I can't wait to hear about it from a guest perspective
What do they do there?
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Welcome to DFW The American Terminals are far nicer than the other ones at our airport lol... Hopefully you didn't end up switching to a yucky one for the second leg!
They were pretty neat - and we were flying American the whole way, so we were Ok with the terminals. Whereabouts in Texas are you?
I had so much trouble posting on the old one I gave up. Just wanted to say it's such a bummer to hear about Mama Melrose's. DHS was the only park I'd ever encountered rude CM's at the restaurants - same situation as yours but at H&V.
Ready to move on to Hawaii now! Of course if you slept later, it'd take an hour to get to your gate. Glad you started to feel better by boarding time! And yes, where are those cows??
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They were pretty neat - and we were flying American the whole way, so we were Ok with the terminals. Whereabouts in Texas are you?
She works in the back office. Her name is Crystal if you had any interaction with her, she's truly one of the most magical Disney-fied people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing
And I live in Dallas, on the north side so DFW is about 30 minutes from me and DAL is about 15, but I prefer American so that's where I tend to end up!
That was a fast check-in!
Sorry you felt so lousy when you woke up, but glad it seemed to pass after a bit more sleep, some food, and that cure-all cuppa!
I had so much trouble posting on the old one I gave up.
Sorry about that. I really was thinking of starting a new thread with the final day, and in truth, I should've done, as posting replies to it was an absolute nightmare. I just thought it would be very weird to have seven updates on Halloween, then be jumping forward almost two weeks...
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Just wanted to say it's such a bummer to hear about Mama Melrose's. DHS was the only park I'd ever encountered rude CM's at the restaurants - same situation as yours but at H&V.
Sadly it's not a park noted for its dining options...
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Ready to move on to Hawaii now! Of course if you slept later, it'd take an hour to get to your gate. Glad you started to feel better by boarding time! And yes, where are those cows??
Sadly I've yet to see any Texan ones. I think they must run away when they know our plane's coming into land.
She works in the back office. Her name is Crystal if you had any interaction with her, she's truly one of the most magical Disney-fied people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing
It doesn't ring a bell with me, but you never know, I took so many photos that if she ever emerged from the back office, she might be in one!
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And I live in Dallas, on the north side so DFW is about 30 minutes from me and DAL is about 15, but I prefer American so that's where I tend to end up!
Wow, now that's what I call a convenient location.
Glad the two of you got to feeling better after some breakfast. The Dallas Fort Worth airport looks very different from when I was there, but then that was 35 years ago.
Glad the two of you got to feeling better after some breakfast. The Dallas Fort Worth airport looks very different from when I was there, but then that was 35 years ago.
Oh wow! I can imagine it's changed quite a lot in that time.
I've been waiting for this part of the trip! Bring on the pictures!!!!!!
Coming up in due course, but if you want a sneak pic, I have been uploading some to the PassPorter photo archive. I'm still busy uploading, but you will find some there.
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We’d asked for help with our luggage, a service the Hyatt offers that we’d used last time, and the guy was promptly there at 4:45am, and down we headed. It was quite a walk to the American Airlines check-in, so we were glad to have him, and not have to negotiate our way across the carpeted terminal (very nice, but not practical for suitcases… 
Oh well, no photos then, as the laptop was buried under the seat in front, and I wasn’t going to try and get to it during takeoff. 
Welcome to DFW 
*Melissa
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