Dreaming of a Disney spring break! THIS SECTION COMPLETED - Page 9 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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.
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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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I love the topiary pictures and hope to see lots of them in your TR! Speaking of Winnie... when is that new movie coming out?
I'm curious as to why you had a bad experience on your glass bottom boat ride at Castaway Cay?
The movie is out over here in a couple of weeks' time! I think in the States, you have to wait until July for it...
The glass bottom boat ride we went on, we couldn't see that much. First off, it was pretty crowded, but also the glass wasn't very clear. It just wasn't what we were hoping for.
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The movie is out over here in a couple of weeks' time! I think in the States, you have to wait until July for it...
The glass bottom boat ride we went on, we couldn't see that much. First off, it was pretty crowded, but also the glass wasn't very clear. It just wasn't what we were hoping for.
I didn't care for the glass-bottomed boat ride at CC either. It was very hard to see and the CM didn't even know what kinds of fish we were seeing.
The movie is out over here in a couple of weeks' time! I think in the States, you have to wait until July for it...
The glass bottom boat ride we went on, we couldn't see that much. First off, it was pretty crowded, but also the glass wasn't very clear. It just wasn't what we were hoping for.
Wow. I would have thought the water would have been really clear.
That stinks you didn't get any compensation from the whole Egypt mess.
Pre-trip report – part seven: finally success with our seating!
Our cruise documents showed by mid-March, and I was very impressed with everything that was sent to us, especially they listed all the details they had for us. Suddenly the whole thing felt real!
The same day, I decided that I’d log into Virgin Atlantic to see if there were any seats together on the flight on the way back. I wasn’t holding out much hope, given that every time I’d tried up until now, I’d been met with the depressing answer that there was nothing available. However, maybe it was the Disney magic from the delivery we’d had that day, but it all worked out for us, as suddenly I had the opportunity to change to two seats next to each other! That was one weight lifted off our minds...
As the credit card month once again rolled over for the last time before we departed on our travels, I called Disney Vacation Club Member Services to finally get the Deluxe Dining Plan added on to parts of our stay. I knew that I wanted it for the two nights we’d be staying at the Villas at the Wilderness Lodge and the two nights we had at Bay Lake Tower. I’d booked accordingly, making sure to get signature meals and expensive one-credit meals, such as Tutto Italia and the Coral Reef, so we could get maximum bang for our buck. It was just a case of waiting until we had the money to add it in on.
The woman I spoke to at Member Services couldn’t have been more helpful. As well as sorting that out for us, she also got our credit card details added on to all our stays – and as we’re moving around a fair bit, that was no mean feat! – and got express check-out sorted out for us. I had no idea that they could do that for us, but apparently it was one of the features of one of the recent upgrades they did, which is good.
The next day I got our airport hotel sorted out for the night before we fly out. I finally bit the bullet and went with the Hilton, which we’ve stayed in a couple of times before. It’s linked to the south terminal, where we fly from, by a walkway and it’s a lovely place to stay. The trouble is this time, despite a lot of searching, there were just no discounts to be had there. I guess that’s what happens when you stay there on a Wednesday night. If it had been a weekend night, I don’t think I’d have had a problem getting all sorts of discounts on it, but not this time. I finally sucked it up and paid a stupid amount of money for the privilege, at least consoling myself with the fact that it would give me a lot of additional Hilton Honors points!
It was around this time that our renewal came through for our travel insurance. This was something I’d known about for some time and had budgeted for, so it wasn’t an issue, or at least that’s what I thought anyway! When the letter came through, it said I could go online to renew or phone up. As the call centre was only open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm – exactly the hours I’m at work I went online and the system kept throwing me out, so I had no option but to call.
I was stunned by what I was told. Because our policy was automatically renewed last year and we hadn’t done the medical checks for our pre-existing medical conditions (I have chronic fatigue and Mark has high blood pressure), we’d spent the last year not covered for anything medical. Great! I went through all the details, thinking it wouldn’t make much difference, as it hadn’t the first year it had been declared with them. I think it had added about £15. Well, this year, it made a huge difference! The policy started out at £75 to renew and, by the time they’d added on the medical information, it stood at a whopping £150. I couldn’t believe it. : I told her but no thanks. I’d do some shopping around, as I wasn’t going to renew there and then. Of course, they’d left sending out our renewal stuff stupidly late. It was Thursday now and our policy ran out on Tuesday. It immediately became a priority to get another policy in place as soon as possible.
I spent all that evening – or that’s what it felt like anyway! - going to various travel insurance sites to get quotes. Some insurance companies wouldn’t even cover pre-existing medical conditions, so they were out straight away. Annoyingly, others would, but you had to go through entering lots and lots of details to get to that stage, so it took forever. By the end of the night, the best price I’d managed to get was £160, which was worse than the price I’d started out with. I felt totally disillusioned.
With another day, I felt more hopeful and the next night I got back into looking for a policy, discovering a set of companies that dealt with pre-existing medical conditions, so one by one, I went through each of them, checking out prices. It still wasn’t looking good. Again, the best price I’d managed to find was £170. Would I ever get anything cheaper than the initial quote? Ironically, I got to the original company we’d been with and thought I’d price something up with them, as apparently you could get a 10% discount online. I was fascinated to discover that, even if we declared our pre-existing medical conditions, they had a huge disclaimer to say that they wouldn’t cover us anyway. Now, I’m sorry, to me that defeats the whole point. Why would I pay all that extra money for no extra cover? I decided immediately that we were well shot of them.
Finally, just as I was about to give up all hope, the second to last company I tried came up with a total price of £110. That’s it – sold! I couldn’t believe what a long and painful process the whole business had been. Not what we needed a couple of weeks before our vacation was due. :
Now, with just a few days left before our vacation, there wasn’t much to do... or was there? Well, of course there was online check-in, which I was able to complete for both the Beach Club Villas and Wilderness Lodge Villas before we left. The rest would need to be done while we were in Disney.
I also kept an eager eye on Accuweather’s 14 day forecast, although it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to see, with temperatures appearing with a “9” at the beginning of them. My goodness, that’s going to be hot! Fortunately, it looked like, after a couple of days, that would break and become a lot more reasonable – thank goodness!
When it got to 1 April, I went online to Virgin Atlantic’s website to see what films would be on offer for our flights and was stunned by the selection. When I printed them out, it ran to about six pages! There were so many I wanted to see. I was especially pleased to still see the King’s Speech and Black Swan showing, as they had both been on in March and I thought we’d have missed them, but there were so many others too, with Tangled and Red immediately catching my eye. My goodness, at least we wouldn’t be bored on the flights! :
It was around this time that a private message popped into my inbox on the PassPorter boards, with the title “well, guess what?” from Larry (LLaffinPlace). Earlier in this trip report, he’d been saying that it was killing him that he’d be just one state away and it was killing us too. Well, I think you can guess what the e-mail said? That’s right, essentially, that he would be able to come down and join us from the Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon! It didn’t look like Bob would be coming with him but he did promise to keep working on him...
The weekend before we headed out was the time to get the final bits and pieces done. Photopass CD at the pre-pay rate? Check! Add on another behind-the-scenes tour? Check! Hang on.... what was that? Having debated for a long time whether to add in another tour, I finally decided to go for it and booked the Inspiration: Through Walt’s Eyes, as it sounded like a wonderful tour. I knew we wouldn’t be going back to Disney World for some time (probably not until the end of 2012 ) so this would be the last chance to do anything like this for a while, so why not go for it? Good reasoning, huh?
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I had known about Cheryl and Mark's visit for quite a while, and that Wendy and clan were going to be there, too. And I found out later that Heather and Brandon would be going.
When I first heard about the trip, I wanted to target this weekend to be at WDW and see everyone (also because of its proximity to my Birthday) but I had two issues. One, I really had no leave to spare because of a tour I am going on this Summer. Two, I expected to be fully engaged in a proposal effort to hang onto the contract that currently pays my salary.
Thanks to the slowpokes at NASA, who are not being helped by the funding circus in DC I might add, the proposal was delayed. Suddenly (and we're talking last week) I realized that if I could still get the non stop flights on Airtran, I might make this work. I could blow off part of the day on Friday, which would not require a vacation day, and come back on Sunday. I had DVC points available AND an active Annual Pass.
The airfare almost killed it. Only Business Class was available for the trip down and while there was a slightly cheaper seat for the trip back, the bulk of what was available there was also BC. but I really wanted to see everyone, so I decided to be the martyr and suffer through early boarding, larger seats, free bag check and complimentary cocktail!
I called DVC Member Services and got only halfway through my list before scoring a Savannah View Studio Villa at Animal Kingdom Lodge Jambo House.
Success! So, that's how I ended up scheduling my shortest fuse ever trip to WDW to meet up with these fine folks.
One more little tidbit: if the Federal government does shutdown and I know about it with enough lead time, I may be able to extend my stay because I will be on furlough. Of course, given Congress' oft-practiced brinksmanship, I'll bet I won't have enough advanced notice. But this should add a bit of suspense, yes?
Thanks for your patience! I now return this PTR to its rightful owner!
See ya real soon! Safe travels!
__________________
"&Larry"
A beautiful day in the neighborhood!
Last edited by LLaffinPlace; 04-05-2011 at 07:37 PM..
I can completely understand your insurance woes. Since Chad has MS and I had two brain surgeries, we've had the same problem. I usually don't get the travel insurance unless we are going out of the country but even then they usually try to get us on the prices.
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I am just amazed at how much planning has gone into this trip! I applaud you! I've been putting off planning my upcoming trip since everyone will be looking to me to say what we do next.
So glad Larry will be able to join all of you!
Great update Larry! While I hope the gov't gets it all worked out, it would be kind of nice to be able to extend your vacation . . . you can sleep on the pullout couch in our room if you want!
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Glad you were able to get 2 seats together on the way home!! Sorry about the insurance issue, but glad to hear you were able to get a policy. Not long now!!
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I think in the States, you have to wait until July for it... 
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It was just a case of waiting until we had the money to add it in on. 
– and got express check-out sorted out for us. I had no idea that they could do that for us, but apparently it was one of the features of one of the recent upgrades they did, which is good. 
I went online and the system kept throwing me out, so I had no option but to call. 
Great! I went through all the details, thinking it wouldn’t make much difference, as it hadn’t the first year it had been declared with them. I think it had added about £15. Well, this year, it made a huge difference! The policy started out at £75 to renew and, by the time they’d added on the medical information, it stood at a whopping £150. I couldn’t believe it. 
: I told her 
but no thanks. I’d do some shopping around, as I wasn’t going to renew there and then. Of course, they’d left sending out our renewal stuff stupidly late. It was Thursday now and our policy ran out on Tuesday. It immediately became a priority to get another policy in place as soon as possible. 
Now, I’m sorry, to me that defeats the whole point. Why would I pay all that extra money for no extra cover? I decided immediately that we were well shot of them. 
That’s right, essentially, that he would be able to come down and join us from the Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon! 
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