On the road (2) – beaches, castles and chateaux COMPLETED IN THIS FORUM - Page 4 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Great start Cheryl - great pictures of the train, it definitely looks really long. I still think it is just so cool to be able to just drive your car on in England and 30 minutes later get off in France
Great start Cheryl - great pictures of the train, it definitely looks really long. I still think it is just so cool to be able to just drive your car on in England and 30 minutes later get off in France
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We headed off, first towards Boulogne, and my goodness, this was a much nicer and more picturesque drive than the one we’d had heading down towards Switzerland. Almost immediately, I started to see cows, and although I missed getting shots of the first few we saw, after a while, I could hardly fail to get photos of them, there were that many! I was in cow heaven!
Mark was obviously starting to get bored with cow spotting and my constant mooing at all the cows we saw along the way, so he decided to devise descriptions for them. They got more complex, the further we drove and, in fact, later in the day, he kept forgetting what he’d earlier decreed! Basically, up to five cows in a field were “moo”. Between five and ten and the term was “moos”, Get above ten and the term become “mooey”! We had great fun with that on the drive down.... it certainly helped to keep us entertained.
We saw some lovely lush green countryside on the way down, and it was clear that this was very much an agricultural area – and not just because of all the cow sightings. There were also crop growing areas that we drove through, and on more than one occasion, we saw farmers on tractors out in the fields. It was so lovely to see.
Soon we were heading our way down towards our first stop of the day, Rouen. It was founded at the lowest point that the River Seine could be bridged, and as a result, it became a centre of maritime trade. My guidebook tells me that the city suffered severe damage during World War II, but I have to be honest, from what we saw, we couldn’t tell that at all. : We drove into the city along the banks of the Seine, which was a lovely treat.
We followed Tim’s (our sat nav’s name) directions and quickly found ourselves right in front of Rouen Cathedral. Now those of you who read my Switzerland road trip report will know that the whole way through that, we had nothing but amazing luck when it came to finding parking spaces in cities. I was concerned that maybe our luck wouldn’t hold, but as we pulled up in front of the cathedral, wouldn’t you know it, someone was leaving and we took their space.
We paid the parking attendant, after managing to fathom out from him (in French too! ) how much it would cost and how long we could stay there - €2 ($2.40) and an hour and a half were the answers. My goodness, it was burning hot when we stepped out of the car. I must admit that I wondered how Accuweather, which I usually trust with the weather forecast, could’ve got the weather so badly wrong today. They had said 75ºF and cloudy, but in fact the car was already telling us that it was into the 80s and the sun was blazing down. If only we’d have known, we’d have worn something different. Within a few minutes, both of us were regretting our decision to be in jeans today.
As you can see, the faced looked beautiful, but up close, it wasn’t in the greatest state...
Great start Cheryl as well as great pictures. I had to laugh at your entertainment with the cows as we used to do the same in college with all the cows around us. We would even name them Mr. Mooey. I still have tons of your TRs to read too and catch up on. How nice France is that quick of a train ride away from you. More please.
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Basically, up to five cows in a field were “moo”. Between five and ten and the term was “moos”, Get above ten and the term become “mooey”! 
We had great fun with that on the drive down.... it certainly helped to keep us entertained. 
: We drove into the city along the banks of the Seine, which was a lovely treat. 
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