A Magical voyage across the pond LIVE UPDATE 9/30 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Pre-trip report – part one: our Disney Cruise Line history….
Dates: Saturday 8 September – Sunday 30 September Adventurers: Me, Cheryl (45) and DH Mark (52 now... 53 by the time of this adventure....) Destinations: Sailing from Dover, England to Quebec City on back-to-back cruises on the Disney Magic, stopping at Portland (England) Cobh (Ireland), Sydney, Halifax, Saint John (Canada), New York (America), Saguenay and Baie-Comeau (Canada), and then on to New England for a whistle stop visit! Resorts: on board the Disney Magic, the Bouchard Inn, Newport and the Inn at Mystic Meets: cruising with our friends Mari and Raleigh and with an extra passenger from New York City to Quebec City… more to come on that in due course… plus hopefully some meets in New England Celebration: Mark’s birthday and spending time with good friends again
Hi and welcome aboard this latest trip report! It’s kind of hard to know where to begin, as I’ve written one or two (ahem!) of these things now over the years.
I guess introductions would be a good place… I’m Cheryl, I love Disney and travelling, and I’m married to Mark, who thankfully also loves Disney and travelling, which is a good start. Put these two loves together, and what do you get? Well, apart from a hobby that’s very enjoyable, but also very expensive, one of the best way to combine the two is via the Disney Cruise Line, as your hotel floats to exciting new ports.
We’ve come to realise over the last couple of years, much as it shocks us, that we think we actually enjoy cruising more than visiting Walt Disney World, something I never thought I’d say. Don’t get me wrong, Walt Disney World changes all the time, with new attractions, restaurants, and even complete lands in parks, and of course the same is true of the rest of Orlando, but despite that, you are always travelling to the same place. Disney Cruise Line is very different. We now have quite a history with them…
We took our first cruise back in May 2004 on the Disney Wonder on a three night cruise, chosen especially so we could get our feet wet, as it were, and see what we thought of cruising. We liked it well enough, although we did have some issues with sea sickness, particularly on the first night. We found out that it can be a bit choppy where the waters collide at the bottom of Florida, and boy, did we feel it…
It took us until the summer of 2007 for us to set sail again, and this was a much more daring itinerary, the inaugural 11-night Mediterranean sailing on the Disney Magic. We weren’t sure how we’d coped with being on board for so long, and my goodness, we certainly encountered some much more serious weather, shall we say?
Our Capri, Sorrento and Pompeii excursion from Naples ended up becoming the Sorrento and Pompeii tour, as the waters were too rough to get to Capri. We could see why when we were on the hydrofoil to Sorrento, as we literally disappeared under waves. I cannot begin to tell you what a bad experience that was. Oh boy! I was so glad I had tried out some new travel sickness medication, as I wasn’t actually sick. At least 60-70% of the boat were physically sick, and yes, I’m sure you can imagine, it was all pretty unpleasant. I felt like the Pope when we got to Sorrento, and I wanted to kiss the ground, that’s how bad it was.
But that was an excursion, not on the ship itself. Well, we still experienced our fair bit of bad weather on board the Disney Magic. Mark felt sick one night, we were going up and down so much, and was told to go up to deck nine, and he promptly watched the young children’s pool empty all over the deck… I remember clinging to one of the railings in the atrium, waiting to get my photo taken with Mickey, which I managed, and marvelling at the mouse, thinking “do they put lead in those shoes of his?”
The second night, when the captain said it was going to be bad, that was it, we just went to bed early… and slept through it.
Despite that, we still enjoyed the trip, and particularly all the various ports of call we visited. In fact, we loved some of them so much, we went back – most notably to Sorrento and Pompeii, from where we were also able to visit Herculaneum, and take the stunning Amalfi coast drive. We also went back to Florence, which we absolutely adored, and I still have very fond memories of some of the other places we visited along the way, such as Monte Carlo, Marseilles, Sardinia, and our first visit to Barcelona, which we made two further stops at over the next few years.
When we heard Disney would be adding two new ships to the fleet, we were very excited, so much so that we made plans to sail on them when they arrived. The Dream came into service in 2011, and that was cruise number three for us, where we had an inside stateroom, complete with virtual porthole – fun, but we decided we were room snobs and definitely needed a veranda from this point onwards!
Thankfully, we had one for our next cruise that was later the same year, our first trip to Alaska. Oh wow, now that’s a destination and a half! We loved it so much, we went back again, but I’m getting ahead of myself…
We still had one ship we hadn’t yet tried out, the Disney Fantasy, so we put that right the following year, when we spent a week on there cruising the Eastern Caribbean for my 40th birthday. We both loved the new facilities on the Dream and the Fantasy, although sadly their itineraries are a little repetitive, shall we say, whereas the older ships had the much more exciting options…
That’s why we ended up back on the Disney Magic for our sixth cruise in 2014, as it had an amazing itinerary, cruising out of Venice, a sight I will never forget for as long as I live, around the Eastern Mediterranean, taking in ports of call in Greece, Turkey and the Greek Islands. Oh my goodness, was that a hot cruise! I seriously don’t think we had any day where the temperature was much less than 100° Fahrenheit – not pleasant, but again it gave us a wonderful chance to see different places in the world. We enjoyed them, but in the nicest possible way, not places we wanted to race back to. It was just a case of been there, done that, if that makes sense?
The next year, we packed in two more cruises, a short one back on the Dream, and our second Alaskan cruise, which brought us much better weather than our first time there, and some truly amazing experiences, including seeing seven bears, including a mother and her cub way too close to us for comfort…
Our ninth and tenth cruises were both on the Dream, one in late 2016 and the other in early 2017. We were trying to get to Platinum Castaway Club status, which I’ll explain more about in due course. By the time of our second Dream cruise, we had done our 10 cruises, and were Platinum Castaway Club members, just in time for our southern Caribbean cruise out of San Juan.
So that brings us right up to date with our cruising with Disney to date…
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PassPorter Guide Author
plus hopefully some meets in New England 
It’s kind of hard to know where to begin, as I’ve written one or two (ahem!) of these things now over the years. 
Put these two loves together, and what do you get? Well, apart from a hobby that’s very enjoyable, but also very expensive, one of the best way to combine the two is via the Disney Cruise Line, as your hotel floats to exciting new ports. 
Don’t get me wrong, Walt Disney World changes all the time, with new attractions, restaurants, and even complete lands in parks, and of course the same is true of the rest of Orlando, but despite that, you are always travelling to the same place. Disney Cruise Line is very different. We now have quite a history with them… 
Oh boy! I was so glad I had tried out some new travel sickness medication, as I wasn’t actually sick. At least 60-70% of the boat were physically sick, and yes, I’m sure you can imagine, it was all pretty unpleasant. I felt like the Pope when we got to Sorrento, and I wanted to kiss the ground, that’s how bad it was. 
I remember clinging to one of the railings in the atrium, waiting to get my photo taken with Mickey, which I managed, and marvelling at the mouse, thinking “do they put lead in those shoes of his?” 
We loved it so much, we went back again, but I’m getting ahead of myself…
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