The Whole Family? My Poconos Trip Report UPDATED 8/2 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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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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The Whole Family? My Poconos Trip Report UPDATED 8/2
Welcome to my newest trip report! I am very excited for this trip and can't wait to share it with all of my Passporter Pals (that's you!). Here's the whole back story on how this trip and trip report title came to be.
Tomorrow 4/17, my dads parents (not the same grandparents I talked about in my "I am freaking out" trip report) are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and we wanted to surprise them and take them somewhere special. So the WHOLE family (except for them. It's still a secret!) sat down and got thinking. At first, I thought "Hey! Why don't we go on a Disney cruise?! They would love that!" (and so would I!). We looked at pricing and it just wasn't in the budget for some of us. So that idea was out. Then, we decided to put all of our ideas into a hat and pull them out until we found a good choice for all of us. So of course, I wrote down "Disneyland California" and tossed it in the hat. I have never been there and I really want to. It was actually the first slip of paper that got pulled out of the hat! Again, we looked at prices and again my bright idea was just too much money. Oh well, I tried! Someone also threw in Disney World and we figured that if Disneyland was too much, than maybe Disney world would be less since we could potentially drive. But again, just too much. But I don't think that my grandparents would enjoy walking around a Disney theme park all day in the heat. We kinda started thinking about us more than what they would enjoy. Then, it was my turn to reach in and grab a slip of paper. I pulled it out and read it aloud. "Pocono Mountains". HMMMM. It's only a 2 hour drive from our house and the prices were quite reasonable. So we found a nice hotel (that I can't quite think of the name of it) that has alot of family friendly activities as well as things to do alone. So we booked our journey!
Next: our cast of "characters" (and I mean characters!)
Just so you all know, I probably won't get back to this TR until next week so that I can finish my Disney World trip report.
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