A return to Switzerland – land of mountains, museums and moos! COMPLETED 12/4 - Page 76 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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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Loved the feel of Lichtenstein. Some great photos from there, especially in the valleys!
Good that you got to visit Zurich and now I know it's not really for me as it just seems like a big city. Seems like you got to see what was important there. Liked your photos from the National Museum. Very interesting on the history of Schweiz!
Now Baden is more like my kind of town as feel as those valleys with your boys and the alps. That's what I like to see in Switzerland. As you said the only city to really see is Lucerne.
Liked the bridge in Baden. The Kappelbrucke in Luzern is quite a bridge as well, with all the artwork inside.
I'm from the New England area and there are a share of covered bridges. I'm close to NYC but if you go up to the north eastern portions of my state of CT, I believe there are still a couple up there. One is in the town of Cornwall in the very northeast of the state, just south of the Massachusetts border. I believe it's on Route 7, which runs from the southern coastline in Norwalk all the way up there.
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October 6, 2017-Enjoying an amazing dinner at Victoria & Albert's with PP's Dot and Drew
My TR from my most recent trip is now underway. Includes: Universal Studios Florida, Disney World and Sea World Orlando Trifecta TR -Updated December 10th! TR is now COMPLETED!
Frustrating not to be able to see the baths, but at least you got to poke around the town a bit.
There are old covered bridges in New England, for sure. Most are now closed to car traffic, but you can get close enough to photograph and some you can walk through. There are a few that are still ok to drive through. They're beautiful!
Loved the feel of Lichtenstein. Some great photos from there, especially in the valleys!
Good that you got to visit Zurich and now I know it's not really for me as it just seems like a big city. Seems like you got to see what was important there. Liked your photos from the National Museum. Very interesting on the history of Schweiz!
In fairness to Zurich, we spent a day there on our previous trip and took a tour that lasted all morning and saw the main sights of Zurich. I'd say if you add in the Swiss National Museum, it's worth spending one day there and you'd see all the main sights.
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Now Baden is more like my kind of town as feel as those valleys with your boys and the alps. That's what I like to see in Switzerland. As you said the only city to really see is Lucerne.
Liked the bridge in Baden. The Kappelbrucke in Luzern is quite a bridge as well, with all the artwork inside.
That's beautiful and we really enjoyed it. Very sad that what we see today is a reconstruction, following the awful fire they had there.
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I'm from the New England area and there are a share of covered bridges. I'm close to NYC but if you go up to the north eastern portions of my state of CT, I believe there are still a couple up there. One is in the town of Cornwall in the very northeast of the state, just south of the Massachusetts border. I believe it's on Route 7, which runs from the southern coastline in Norwalk all the way up there.
Friday 6 September – part six: is that cow trekking I see?
Our final stop of the day was the Roman amphitheatre at Windisch. We’d only found out about this from a programme we’d watched on Switzerland, and we thought it looked pretty cool, so we decided to head there. We missed the car park the first time, it was so small. I said to Mark it obviously wasn’t much of a tourist attraction and the truth is – it wasn’t! There wasn’t much to see, and we literally took a few photos of it and left…
We’d seen both Migros and the Coop down the road, so we decided to head there to get something light to eat for a late lunch. I grabbed some Swiss cheese and Mark grabbed some cold meat, along with a bit of French stick, and we got some Swiss chocolate and another bottle of Swiss rose wine to try and we headed back to the car for our impromptu lunch. It was very nice, although it was so hot that by the time we got to the chocolate maybe five minutes after we got back to the car, it was already melting!
All fed, we were off out again, and this time heading for Bolderhof Farm, home to cow trekking. I will say here that I’d told Mark the night before that I was seriously getting the jitters about this. I’d been looking forward to it for so long that now I was worried it wouldn’t live up to my expectations. There was also the small issue of the weather, which wasn’t looking so great for tomorrow, as the forecast said thunderstorms. I wasn’t sure if it would go ahead with a forecast like that…
We headed out, seeing some interesting sights along the way…
It wasn’t long before we hit traffic on the way, although fortunately we got off lightly. The other side of the road had much longer jams.
At one point though, we were going so slowly through one of the tunnels, I was able to get a shot of one of the escape pods. We believe this is to get emergency vehicles in though, rather than necessarily getting people out, hence the size of it.
Once we got off the motorways, we were into rural countryside, full of crops, but interestingly no hills or mountains to be seen anywhere, which was unusual for Switzerland. In a way, it was a pleasant change, and certainly made for some nice photos:
We had to stop at a level crossing at one point for a train, which was being tested. The giveaway was the sign on it – testzug, meaning test train. You see, I do remember some German!
We also saw lots more evidence of crop growing…
There were also vineyards to be seen here…
… and this giant pumpkin, advertising a place selling pumpkins. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a shot of it quickly enough, as it was upon us with no real warning..
In some places, they were getting ready to harvest the crop…
… and in one village, in the middle of nowhere, we found this:
Railway sidings, which was a little bizarre! This was the village that had the railway sidings:
Despite my fears, we found our way to Bolderhof Farm easily enough, and this was the sight that greeted us. Oh my goodness – cow trekking!
We pulled up into the parking area, which was packed:
… and these beautiful guys were in the field next door. Interestingly, later on, they were gone, obviously rotated into another field somewhere on the farm.
Next: this could be embarrassing if this was full!
The Roman ruins looked like a small local park. That's kind of interesting though, to just have some Roman ruins laying around when the kids go play at the park....
Yay, you've arrived for cow trekking!!!
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Tanya
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Oh, the suspense, waiting for the actual moment when you are sitting on a cow! Glad you found the place without too much trouble. By the looks of all the cars, cow-trecking is a pretty popular activity.
The Roman ruins looked like a small local park. That's kind of interesting though, to just have some Roman ruins laying around when the kids go play at the park....
I guess when you put it like that... I also guess I'm used to that sort of thing, having grown up with Roman baths seriously about three or four miles away from where we lived when I was a kid.
Tiny Roman ruins! Beautiful scenery on your drive even if the mountains were replaced with crop fields. I was getting excited as I felt cow trekking was about to be shown and explained. But then you stopped! Must be patient.
Tiny Roman ruins! Beautiful scenery on your drive even if the mountains were replaced with crop fields. I was getting excited as I felt cow trekking was about to be shown and explained. But then you stopped! Must be patient.
Can't wait for morning to hear about cow trekking! But now that I think about it, I'll bet we need to wait still another day or two until you get to the actual trek....
Can't wait for morning to hear about cow trekking! But now that I think about it, I'll bet we need to wait still another day or two until you get to the actual trek....