I LOVE Comedians with Guitars......You didn't tell me that part...COMPLETE 2/28/13 - Page 16 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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!
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It was really neat to see. I kind of want to see a real shopwreck now in the future...meaning one that actually sank and wasn't blown to peices.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MayraLR
Great underwater photos! What a great experience! I'd never do it though, as I'm a scaredy cat and I'm terrified of the water.
It was fun. The water wasn't super deep either, so that was a plus.
The told us some fact...and I can't remember it now, but basically the front of the magic was in a certain feet of water, (mayber like 80 or 90 feet) but the back of the ship was in like thousands of feet deeper.
This boat went by a couple of times. If I remember right, it had windows down below and it was an excursion to look at sea life.
There’s Brook.
A last look under the sea.
I was now to the point that I had to go to the bathroom. I was also starting to get a little cold and waterlogged, so I got out.
Brook and Lisa soon followed.
We got one more group picture as we waited for the rest to come back onboard.
Soon it was time to go and everyone had returned. We motored on over to where we had gotten on the boat and set off back to the ship. We tipped our guys because they were fabulous. We decided to go back and freshen up and get a bite to eat then meet up with Carolyn, Susan and Shelly.
I took a few pictures as we walked back.
Hey, there’s a rooster walking around.
I really had to go to the bathroom quite badly at this point. We spotted public bathrooms and Brook and Lisa declined to go in, but at this point a hole in the ground was gonna work for me, so I went in. Surprisingly these were pretty decent bathrooms. I would say on the line with the Castaway Cay ones. Not fabulous, but decent and they weren’t dirty.
Now that I felt so much better, we headed back to the tender area.
Easy to find the Mickey Boat!
Disney’s area was so much nicer than the Carnival one. They had a shaded canopy with cold water and cold towels waiting for us.
We soon were on a tender.
We made some chit chat with the one guy. I think he took a liking to Lisa. He was very friendly, but honestly we had a hard time understanding him and we did a lot of smiling and nodding.
A guy came on wearing a Fantasy Inaugural Sweatshirt and carrying a guitar. We kind of heard hints of whispers that he was new entertainment coming on board and that the 2 other ones had left that morning. I never realized this, but I guess a lot of the entertainment does not stay on board the whole week. They will get off at a port and fly home, or fly into a port and join the cruise midway. I LOVED this guy’s sweatshirt by the way. I sure wish I could find a way to get one myself.
We soon set sail back to the ship and we saw some people enjoying themselves.
I took a few pictures of the Carnival Destiny as we went by her.
Back to the Magic.
As we were pulling in, we had a to wait a minute for the other tenders to get out of the way. All of a sudden Brook says, there is Carolyn on that one. I couldn’t believe she saw her. She said Susan wears big sunglasses with bright white rims and they caught her eye. LOL. We hollered back and forth and let them know we would meet up with them in about 45 minutes or so at Margaritaville.
Your snorkeling trip looked like a lot of fun. Glad to see the underwater pix.. Nice. I bought an UW camera this summer and used it in a water park in July. Took it with me to WDW in September in case of rain. Haven't used it much but would like to have the opportunity like you had. I have a Pentax WG2. What are you using?
Your snorkeling trip looked like a lot of fun. Glad to see the underwater pix.. Nice. I bought an UW camera this summer and used it in a water park in July. Took it with me to WDW in September in case of rain. Haven't used it much but would like to have the opportunity like you had. I have a Pentax WG2. What are you using?
I have a fuji. I can't remember the model, but it's not the newest one. I saw Brooks phots the other day. Wow! Her's are VERY clear. I think hers is a nikon. if i used it more often, I would be half tempted to buy her model.
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The other gals had ordered food, but since we had just eaten, we didn’t, but we did each order a pop.
We weren’t there for long and decided to get moving. For some reason the waitress put it all on one bill. So annoying. I swear she said that it was $1.50 American to $1 Grand Cayman, but we asked Carolyn how much we owed her and she gave us a price that seemed way too little. I think Lisa gave her the money for our drinks since I paid the tip on the snorkeling excursion, so I am not for sure what the exact total came to.
We decided to take a bus around the island and see what it looked like. Lisa and I debated on this a bit. It sounded fun, yet we weren’t sure we wanted to do it. Finally we said OK and went along.
As we headed out we took picture of Margaritaville.
Lisa and I.
They had a pool area here too.
Another stop for touristy pictures.
We had a few issues finding this bus stop. We were told it was behind Margaritaville, but honestly we just didn’t see it, nor any buses around.
We decided to look in here a minute because who ever heard of bamboo socks?
Well they had them and sheets and just about anything you could think of made out of bamboo. The clothing was VERY soft, and PRICEY.
We won’t be taking those home with us.
We kept on looking
Lots of Banks in Grand Cayman. And jewelry stores. At one point Shelly asked what the local time was as it was an hour ahead on clock she saw. I thought that was correct, but the ship stayed on Galveston time. But then later we saw another clock that had the same time as Galveston. Weird. We never figured it out. Some people said they were the same, while other said it was an hour ahead.
Finally we asked someone where the bus stop was. Well we weren’t too far…and this was not really a bus. There was an area with lots of vans parked. These were the “buses”. They asked where you wanted to go, more like a taxi that followed a route. We said we just wanted to make a loop and end up back here. So we all got in and started off. This van still made stops throughout the island, but very few people got on or off. You could tell some people used this to get to and from work, and I must say, if you got on near the beginning of the route and worked near the end, that is a long ride …..at least it seemed like it to me.
The whole reason for this ride was to see some local life. I will warn you now, I took quite a few pictures …through a window in a moving van, so needless to say, they are not great, but it will give you an idea what the island is like.
Our bus is fresh too!
Let’s just say some of the decor is kind of interesting.
As always - enjoying your photos. Snorkeling one of my favorite activities when in Hawaii. Someday I will make it on a cruise. Have a set of the Bamboo Sheets and Towels, were pricey. But so soft, I love them, wish I could afford a 2nd sets.
How cool that you got to see a slice of local life.
It was interesting
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari2137
As always - enjoying your photos. Snorkeling one of my favorite activities when in Hawaii. Someday I will make it on a cruise. Have a set of the Bamboo Sheets and Towels, were pricey. But so soft, I love them, wish I could afford a 2nd sets.
Thanks. I do enjoy snorkeling. Claire did it for the first time in Nov and she loved it too.
I would love to have a set of those sheets. They were so soft and so high dollar. About laughed when I saw the price.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mommapants
what great photos from your snorkle adventure.
I think some of the fun of traveling is to see the local culture so that bus ride would be something I would do too.
It was interesting. Brook and Carolyn took a taxi around in Costa Maya too, but we decided to just stay in the port area there.
We passed some resorts and nice houses along the way. And some not so nice as well.
And we spot some beach!
I think they must’ve been doing some remodeling, as all the bedroom furniture was outside.
And here is a sight you don’t normally see every day ……….
Unless you are me! This is a common sight out in my back yard every day.
In case you didn’t know, my husband is a dairy farmer.
On our route we made stops and picked up some people and dropped them off. It was obvious that some were coming or going to work. I wouldn’t mind taking this bus to the beach, as it was close, but coming back would take a lot longer. Keep that in mind if you ever decide to use this option. It would be cheap transportation, but time wise coming back, not very good.
One last shot before we made it back to where we started.
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