Wise Women, Good Looking Men and Way Cool Teens - Page 10 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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With work and the holidays, this trip report didn't make it to the computer as fast as it should have. But that's life sometimes. Our pre-trip report explains the who and why of this trip http://www.passporterboards.com/foru...come-afar.html . Someday I'll get the hang of getting the link so it just shows as a title, but till then we'll make do. It was a wonderful trip and I loved meeting up with the other Wise Women. Lots of planning, lots of life changes--it's been a wild year. One of the hurdles for me was to see how easy it is to visit WDW as a newly diagnosed diabetic. I've also been doing the Challenge here and have lost 50 pounds! So I was working on adjusting to eating less, eating the right stuff and using that free Disney Dining to its fullest!
Since Betty Sue likes the road trip reports, I'll get started with that. Dbf and I drove from Missouri. We have a Prius and for those who wonder, it got an average of 42 mpg, sometimes it was getting 54 mpg but trip total was 42.3. Not bad all in all. The GPS came in handy several times. Our maps, and print outs of our route sometimes deviated from real life. One section of road was supposed to have opened in November but wasn't yet. We went into a handy conviene store where they gave us one of their photocopies of the way around the construction. Guess we weren't the first folks to stop in there.
Dec 5
We said good-bye to my dd the night before since she's not much of a morning person. We woke early, threw the last items into the suitcase and headed out the door. Yes, its true. I had the suitcases packed for sometime, like a month or so. I re-packed and adjusted for the weather the last week. Can you tell Mickey Magic was needed?
We got to IHOP at 6:41 and had breakfast and got coffe for the road. Its a good thing I don't believe in omens because while we were there, my special Mickey necklace broke. Danny made it for me and I've worn it everyday since he gave it to me. It's my worry stone; it's my micky magic.
Luckily Wal-Mart is next door to IHOP so we stopped in there for some small tools. He fixed Mickey and we were on the road by 7:30.
It was somewhere around St Louis that my body decided that it was going to be a long trip. For some reason, my bladder dediced that it always needed to go. No other symptoms of a UTI so it seemed like a good idea to keep going. Surely there are reststops and bathrooms all the way to Florida. Sadly, this proved to be so not true. I think every reststop in Missouri was closed. I don't think we found many in Arkansas and there is a LOOOOOOONG stretch in Alabama with no reststops, gas stations or food places. It looked like that camping "outdoor" training was going to come in handy.
Two potty stops into the trip, we came to the Pony Express Pizza on I-55. The place is decorated in John Wayne and cowboys. They have the walls covered with pictures with him in movies from "The Big Sky" to "The Shootist." They even had a display case with John Wayne memorabilia, including John Wayne toilet paper--it's rough and tough.
I don't think its right to use a places bathroom without buying something, so we had something to drink and eat. Dbf decided to try fried pickle chips since he had never had them before. They were excellent and I had one biscuit with a little real sausage gravy. And then we were off again to the next potty stop. It's really hard to drink alot of water when you have no idea where the next potty is.
By 12:45 we had made it to Lambert's.
I don't think I've ever seen them as crowded as they were that day! The guy thought the wait would be an hour. I really think he overestimated with the crowd size, but we decided throwed rolls could wait until the trip home.
One of the things the kids always did on road trips was look for birds of prey--all those hawks, etc that sit in trees beside the road and on road signs. I think I did it on this trip out of habit. It was amazing how many there were along that stretch of highway! Missouri and Arkansas had lots with the number decreasing the further south we went. Don't know why that is, guess I'll have to find out.
at last, a rest stop!
Really flat land.
Missouri is rolling hills and prairie in the middle where I'm from. Then there are the Ozarks which are major hills, junior mountains so really flat land are different. We generally only get flat lands like this between river bluffs aren't really all that far apart.
Other than stopping at every potty we found the trip was smooth. As trime has past, I've found that I hate driving in/through/around big cities. I grew up in KC and big city traffic, so this baffles me. Two lanes of traffic isn't bad but 3+ lanes of people whizzing around us/each other, the constant lane changing for no reason just drives me crazy. When I need to relax I rub my Mickey neclace....poor guy, his ears were getting lots love going through Birmingham and the construction zone!
The Best Western we intended to stay at turned out to be in the middle of the construction and seemingly there was no easy way to get to it. So we just kept moving to Calara, AL. We found a Hampton Inn there and got the last room they had! Seems there was a Red Hat Lady convention there.
OMG, I love Hampton Inn! We had never stayed in one before, but will certainly stay there on future trips.
Awesome, awesome room and the walk-in shower is big enough for two people!
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I don't think we found many in Arkansas and there is a LOOOOOOONG stretch in Alabama with no reststops, gas stations or food places. It looked like that camping "outdoor" training was going to come in handy.
Parlor Panther in 'stalking mode'
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