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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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.
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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 gang's all here! So here's who all is coming on the trip. See if you can follow...
Room 1 - Kenny, Charlotte, me
Room 2 - my parents (Rick and Lynne)
room 3 - Kenny's mom (Kathy), dad (Ken) and sister (Bethany)
room 4 - Kenny's aunt Barb and Uncle Matt
Room 5 - Kenny's cousins Steve and Sean (Barb and Matt's kids who are both in their mid twenties)
Room 6 - Kenny's cousin Monica (Barb and Matt's daughter) her husband Mike and their 11 month old, Adeline
So altogether that is 15 people (13 adults and 2 babies!)
We all made our hotel reservations separately after we booked our flights. Then, in October the discounts were released for the winter season. Since I have a Disney visa, I was able to call and get my discount applied to my room a day before the general public. I was only on hold for a few minutes. I had to change our room from a standard room to a standard pool view, but it still saved us money overall. Everyone else in our group had to call the next day when the discount went live for the general public. Some of the people were on hold for 5 hours! When Monica got through, she was able to get the discount applied to some of the other rooms since she knew their contact information. If I had known you could do that, I would have tried to get the discount applied for the whole group when I called, I haven't even thought of asking!
I'm going a little out of order here, but we (I!) made the dining reservations for our group at our 180 day mark. I was wary about trying to get reservations at some of these places for this many people, but luckily I was able to get everything we wanted with no trouble! We didn't want too much of this trip to be planned in advance, but we did know that we would want a few nice sit down meals. My husbands birthday is the Saturday that we are there, and his favorite is Ohana. However, this is the night before the race. There was no way that I was going to eat at Ohana and run 13.1 miles the next day! so we settled on Ohana for Friday night, Via Napoli for Saturday, and Sci-Fi for Sunday. I also scheduled the Wishes dessert party as a birthday surprise for Kenny (but of course the surprise was ruined a few hours later when he saw the reservation on my MDE account, oh well! Neither of us are good secret keepers lol).
Other other random things (sorry this post is all over the place!) my mom and dad were planning on coming down Friday night, while we are all getting there Thursday night. She is a secretary in a school and only gets two personal days. Well two weeks ago (on her birthday appropriately!) she showed up at work, and the ended up canceling because of snow after she got there. She was allowed to go home, but asked the principal if she stayed and worked all day, if she could add another day onto her Florida trip and he said yes! They were able to get their flights changed with no problem, but we have been checking for two weeks and there are ZeRO rooms available at the pop century for that night! Boo! So they have booked a hotel near the airport, and we're hoping that they can snag at room at the Pop at thr last minute!
Ok that is all for now! Next time I'll get into our day by day schedule, and by the time I finish that we'll be on our way! I have one more long run to do tomorrow and then finishing packing! We are currently smowed in at my parents house who live about an hour away from us. We were planning on going home this afternoon but the weather is awful! So maybe I'll get another update in tonight!
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We leave tomorrow! Eekk! So exciting, just need to finish packing and finish up my sub plans for while I am gone (I Ana teacher and I'm sure some of you can relate... It's a lot more work not to be there in school - I have 15 pages of lesson plans for 3 days off of work!).
So here are our plans...
Thursday - we are still going to send Charlotte to daycare so that we can finish up with packing and having everything ready to go. I was going to work a full day, but we will need to leave for the airport by 4:45, so I figured I would take a half day so that I'm not rushed and stressed out. So I'll work, finish packing, and then pick Charlotte up at daycare. We are going to leave around 5:45. Picking up Kenny's parents and sister, who each live within a few miles of us we are hoping that we can fit everything in our Pilot- we know it will be a tight squeeze, but it is only about 1/2 hr to the airport, and it will save us the cost of having two cars parked at the airport. So hopefully that all goes well! So we should be at the airport around 5:25/5:30. We'll get our luggage checked, and we have to check Charlotte in and show her birth certificate since she will be a lap infant on this flight. Then we will grab a quick bite to eat and then head to our gate! Our flight leaves at 7:35 and we should land in Orlando at 10. We will have to get our own luggage at baggage claim, and then we can head to the Magical Express which will take us to the POP. Charlotte usually goes to bed around 7:30 or 8:00, so hopefully we can give her a bottle during takeoff like they recommend and hopefully she will fall asleep! Once we get checked into our room (we received an email that we can try the new 'go directly to your room') then we will have to call and have them deliver our pack n play. Hopefully Charlotte will sleep well and I can get some things unpacked (I like to have everything in its place- I'm very organized lol). We will be up early for a full day in the Magic Kingdom on Friday so we'll want to get organized and get to bed ASAP.
What started out as my 'relax and get settled in' day has now turned into a full-blown park day (since we have that extra day on our ticket you know). So we are planning on being at the park at rope drop. We have FP+ on Friday for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Space Mountain and Splash Mountain (not sure about that since right now the forcast says the high on Friday is 58! I love this ride, just hate that you have to get wet at the end!). Monica, Mike, Sean, and I will leave the park around noon. Steve (Monica's brother, so that makes his my husband's cousin), is driving down so he will have a car there. We are going to take the bus back to the POP and then use his car to drive to the Expo at WWS. Last time we ran the race, we waited about 45 minutes after we were done at the Expo for a bus to go back to our resort. So since POP is so close to WWS, we figured that we could just take his car to get there and back quickly. We will have to pick up our bibs and race shirts, and probably quickly browse some things at the Expo. We also have to pick up Charlotte and Adeline's race bibs and shirts, I forgot to mention that they are both doing the diaper dash! LOL. Adeline will be very good at it, as she is 11 months old. Charlotte has just started to Army-crawl on her stomach, so I have a feeling that Kenny may be carrying her during the race, as I can't imagine her 'dashing' anywhere (although she does get around fast with her Army crawl!)
After we are done at the Expo, we will take a bus back to the MK to meet up with our group. We have dinner reservations at 'Ohana at 5:15, and then depending on how the little ones are doing, we would like to stay for the MSEP and Wishes.
Saturday...
The Diaper Dash is in the EPCOT parking lot and I think we have to be there around 8:45. After the race, we will spend the day in EPCOT. We have FP+ for Spaceship Earth, Soarin', and the Character Spot. We thought this would be a good opportunity to meet the characters since the line is indoors, and since you get to see a variety of characters for only standing in line once. Also, there isn't really much else here that is worth of a FP+ reservation. We will probably eat lunch at Sunshine Seasons or maybe in one of the country's counter service (Mexico? China?) It will just depend where we are at around lunchtime. We do have dinner reservations at Via Napoli at 6:00 I believe. We wanted to make sure that we were somewhere that we could get pasta the night before the race! I'm not sure if we will stay for Illuminations, as us racers will need to get to bed at a reasonable time. I know that some of the group wants to see the Boardwalk area, so I told them that after our dinner might be a good time for them to do that. Also, Kenny would love to see Yee Haw Bob at Port Orleans Riverside at some point during our trip. This day is his birthday, so maybe he can convince some people to go with him! We love to stay at POR and make it a point to schedule in time to see Yee Haw Bob when we stay there!
Other than our FP+ and dining reservations, I don't think any of us really have any 'must-do's' or any high expectations of what we will accomplish each day. We know that we don't have any idea how the kids will be, so we are just planning on going with the flow to try and enjoy the trip and not get stressed about anything!
Update on my parents: Yesterday (as I do many times a day for them) I check online to see if there were any rooms at the Pop Century available for Thursday night, and a Standard Room appeared to be available! I called Disney to add it to my parents reservation, but the man said it wasn't showing available on his end (even though I made sure it wasn't in my 'cart'). He said if I saw it on my end, to go ahead and book it online, and then just call back and have the reservations linked. I called my mom and she tried to do this... it let her get all the way through the process even entering her credit card information, then it told her there was an error. She called Disney and they still weren't showing it as available. She kept trying throughout the evening, and I suggested she start over. She took it out of her cart and started all over, and it worked! Yea!!!!! They were able to get a standard room for Thursday and they have a Standard Pool View for the rest of the trip, but at least they have a room, and hopefully some Disney Magic can keep them in the same room for the whole trip so they don't have to switch. This will be much better, as they will be able to get up and go to the park with us Friday morning now instead of meeting us there later once they had switched hotels and everything. Yea!
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It's all coming together nicely! Yeah, your weather forecast is looking chilly. Be sure to pack some old throw away clothes to keep warm while standing around and waiting for the start of the race!
__________________
Tanya
Every click helps feed .6 bowls of food to rescued animals. Give a quick click every day and help animals in shelters! www.theanimalrescuesite.com
It's all coming together nicely! Yeah, your weather forecast is looking chilly. Be sure to pack some old throw away clothes to keep warm while standing around and waiting for the start of the race!
Thanks - that is on my list! As of right now the forcast for Sunday is a high in the 80's, so hopefully it won't be too chilly early in the am! I do have on my packing list to include a throw away shirt and some cheap gloves for while we are waiting!
Race Day! We will probably leave to catch the bus by 3:30, so I will probably have to get up around 2:45 or 3. Kenny and Charlotte will still be sleeping (hopefully!) . I am still nursing so I will have to get up and pump so that Kenny can give Charlotte a bottle when she wakes up. But hopefully I can do that and get dressed quickly and quietly. When we last ran the race a few years ago, it was quite the procedure to buy one of the breakfast boxes, so I think I am going to take my own food this year for breakfast. Last time we took it with us and ate once we got to the race area, we will probably do that again to pass some of the time while we are waiting! I am glad that I have done the race before, I will have such a better idea of what to expect this time! Last time we kept waiting in the crazy long lines for the bathrooms, because we weren't sure if there would be more along the way. Well of course there were, so now we know we can just wait until closer to the start line where we shouldn't have to wait in line nearly as long!
We are in corrals K and L (I am in K and everyone else is in L... does anyone know if I can move back to run with them? I know you used to be able to do this but I wasn't sure if you were still allowed to.) We will probably actually start running around 6:00, and with our run/walk pace we should finish around 8:45 I would guess. Last time we finished in 2:56 (those last few miles are a killer, especially running up that on ramp around mile 11!). I was originally hoping to finish this year in 2:30, but being as I did not train nearly as much as I was planning on it, at this point I will be happy if I finish better than we did last time. After the race, we will take some pictures and then the racers will head back to the hotel to shower. Everyone else will need to take a bus to DHS (we don't have park hoppers so they can't go through EPCOT to get there). We should be able to shower and get back to DHS by noon if transportation cooperates with us! We have FP+ reservations for the Frozen Sing a Long, Tower of Terror, and TSMM. We have dinner reservations at Sci-Fi, but we would like to visit Downtown Disney at some point on our trip as well. We are now thinking that we are going to cancel our Sci-Fi reservation and spend some of the afternoon at the pool (it is supposed to be in the 80's!) and then maybe do the evening at Downtown Disney. Beyond the rides that we have FP+ for a few others, there aren't a ton of things that are 'must-see's' for us at DHS. So I think our plans are changing a bit here to make sure we have time for pool time and DTD.
We're trying to think of somewhere good to go in DHS for lunch. I'm sure we'll be starving after the race, but there isn't really any counter service at DHS that knocks my socks off. So we'll probably just pick a place based on where the group is at when we get to DHS. (In hindsight, we should have made the Sci-Fi reservation for lunch on this day. But with a group of 15, there's no hope in changing it to lunch now!)
Yes, you can still move back a corral without worry! FWIW, I was in M for the Half and Full this past January and we didn't cross the start until 6:20ish. So L isn't much ahead. I would think you may cross around 6:10-:15 instead of 6. Just FYI to help plan the rest of your day - add maybe 15 minutes later to your estimated finish time!
Yeah. DHS counter service isn't stellar. Very standard fare. Although, after a half marathon, pretty much any food is really very tasty.
__________________
Tanya
Every click helps feed .6 bowls of food to rescued animals. Give a quick click every day and help animals in shelters! www.theanimalrescuesite.com
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Disney Magic - Oct 2015
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