A Baltic boating adventure TRIP REPORT COMPLETED 11/19 - Page 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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Mental note should Chez ever come to visit... tell all local "chemists" to stock up as Chez will be making multiple trips during her visit! My goodness, between Mark's ear, his ankle, and your sunburn, you were quite the boon for local business.
I promise, we are not usually this bad! And usually we have a good supply of medication with us as well.. honestly!
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Sunday 5 June – part one: this is a lot quieter than Friday night…
Considering we only went to bed around 10:40pm last night, I was not impressed when my body woke me up seven hours later, demanding use of the bathroom. At least I had slept like the proverbial log, which was a definite improvement from last night.
However, I couldn’t lie down any longer, as I was having problems breathing. I’d noticed this yesterday as well, and I was using a fair bit of Olbas Oil to clear my nose, so I decided to take the bigger bottle with us, rather than the one that was rapidly running out. I also took the opportunity to take a deodorant with me that seems to have more in it than the one I’d packed. Two bonus reasons to come home – oh and we’d never turned the heating down when we left, and the house was cooking now, so I did that as well. Another reason to come back.
Talking of the weather, we’ve totally changed what we’ll be wearing today, as the weather forecast last night suddenly changed, from it being sunnier, but colder today, to it would be in the mid 20s. Ok, I don’t think jeans are going to work for us today now… I think we’ll also take the suntan lotion with us as well…
We left the house not much after 7:30am, as I had suggested that we stop off at the services that we visited yesterday for breakfast at McDonald’s. My reasoning was there couldn’t be that much traffic early on a Sunday morning.
When we headed out, it was a beautiful morning…
It was forecast to reach the mid 70s today, a big change to the forecast just a couple of days earlier, which said it would be sunny, but not that warm. Well, that’s warm to me!
As we headed on to the motorway, there weren’t many cars…
… but there were literally hundreds of cows!
We headed back to the same services we’d stopped at just 36 hours earlier…
… and indulged in a McDonald’s breakfast…
Look how lovely and quiet it was in here!
We were soon on our way again, and despite the car’s GPS constantly trying to send us a different route, one we knew had roadworks on it, we stuck to our guns. We had our fair share of drama though, from a broken down car, just after a major tunnel, to two further breakdowns, and a cycle race, which was just chaos, as everyone was having to pull out into the second lane of a two lane road to give them enough space.
Soon we were heading past Portsmouth again, and the car GPS was just about having a fit, trying to take us off through Southampton. I don’t think so! We knew that would take much longer, so I called up Google Maps, and found a much quicker route instead. Soon we were arriving at this place…
I had said to Mark that we could go to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, as I knew he was keen to go back, and I wanted him to do something today, given he’d had to do all the extra driving because of my stupidity, but when I mentioned this place, he went for it.
As soon as we arrived, I headed off to the restrooms to change into my contact lenses, as it was now really sunny, and to lather up with my factor 50 sunscreen, as I did not want any further burn after yesterday.
Then we paid our admission (£10.95 ($15.30)each) and headed inside. At first, I was wondering what we’d done, as we walked past a load of owls, and couldn’t really find any. I was thinking it was going to be one of those days.. but thankfully we found the otters, even if they were fast asleep…
We headed into the Greenhouse, which pretty much did what it said on the tin…
We weren’t lucking out on the animals in here, with nothing to be seen, but then a cute ferret (and seriously I never thought I’d put those two words in the same sentence ) poked his head out. Look, he’s really quite adorable…
Next: I wasn’t expecting to find this sunbathing here!
Glad you could find a few other reasons to make that trip back home! (and you reminded me I need to turn the thermostats up and put the system on hold as we hit the road shortly)
Hoping there are more animals to be seen than some sleeping otters and a single ferret!
It does look like great weather - and even better, low traffic - today. Hope that was the theme for the whole day for you.
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Glad you could find a few other reasons to make that trip back home! (and you reminded me I need to turn the thermostats up and put the system on hold as we hit the road shortly)
Glad I could help out and hope you have a great time!
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Hoping there are more animals to be seen than some sleeping otters and a single ferret!
Thankfully there were!
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It does look like great weather - and even better, low traffic - today. Hope that was the theme for the whole day for you.
Sunday 5 June – part two: I wasn’t expecting to find this sunbathing here!
We were going to carry on walking, but when we’d walked in, you could either go right into this area, or left into the tropical butterfly house. I looked at the map, and realised we were going the right way to see the rest of the park, but it would mean missing the butterflies, and I didn’t want to do that, so we backtracked, and headed in there. Wow, the heat! I said to Mark I was glad we were coming in here early, and not later when it was supposed to be even hotter outside.
The first thing we saw was this guy…
Now I don’t know about you guys, but we tend not to have that much joy with butterfly houses. They always seem to be on the go, never settling, and it’s very different to get photographs of them. Well, nothing could be further from that today, with so many of them settled, and we got to witness them feeding, and just acting naturally. Perhaps it was the fact that we were the only ones in here at the time, or maybe it was the fact that it’s just very well laid out, and the butterflies feel really calm in here. Either way, we had a great time.
If some of the shots look blurred to you, it’s because the butterflies were moving in them. I did struggle to capture them properly. If I put the camera on a sports setting, then half the time it wouldn’t focus properly, but if I put it on a macro setting, then the movement looked blur, so I just did the best I could with them.
Eventually we dragged ourselves away, and back into the relative cold of the rest of the greenhouse, and we continued with our tour. The next section was the nocturnal area, but we couldn’t see anything, and at this point, didn’t have much of a clue what we were looking for…
We headed outside, and this is a beautifully landscaped park, filled with rhododendrons, which were just passing their best. It made for a spectacular sight, and I don’t doubt that people visiting at other times of the year probably look at all the trees and shrubs, don’t realise what they are and the magnificent show they give during the spring months…
We opted to walk past the deer encounter, as we didn’t really look at the map, and thought that’s all it was. We would realise our mistake later…
We did seem to be about the only people in this part of the park, as I don’t think we saw a single other soul, except for a couple of staff members, until we got back to near the entrance, which was wonderful, albeit a little spooky at the same time.
When we got to this bit…
… we got the shock of our lives, finding this guy just lying there sunbathing!
It’s not exactly what you expect to come across, as you normally see animals much further away, and although it was a shock, if you know what I mean, it was a nice one.
There was another one, an albino one, hidden further away in the undergrowth, and Mark thought she might have a baby, as he thought he saw something in her pouch, but we couldn’t tell for certain, given where she was.
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And usually we have a good supply of medication with us as well.. honestly! 
At least I had slept like the proverbial log, which was a definite improvement from last night. 
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