On the road (1) – Six countries, nine days COMPLETED - Page 36 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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At least, from there, it was downwards. The road down was probably much less hairy for Mark to drive, partially because a lot of the twists and turns had been taken out by various tunnels. The longest one we went through was three and a half miles and they’re still building more of them as well. I can see why, as it’ll make the drive a lot easier, but for tourists, what a shame, as you’re cutting out so many amazing views.
A train, complete with equipment to plough through the snow The snow poles – look how high they are!
At one point, we stopped to get some photos of another lake. We did think that this was ridiculously low, but then as we drove further along, we realised that it was all to do with the boring of the new tunnel, as they were taking material from the lake and presumably they’ll fill it back up when it’s all done.
A little further on, we ended up having to take a detour through a village. We suspect there’d been an accident, as the road appeared to have re-opened by the time we re-joined it. It was a bit of a pain for Mark with driving, as it led to more queues, but it was heaven for me, as I got to see some Swiss cows on the way! I have to say here that, while there are lots of cows to be seen in souvenir shops, there aren’t nearly enough out in the fields.
Finally, we were heading into Lucerne and I think Mark was especially relieved to make it to our destination, after something of a hair raising drive to get here!
We lucked out again on the parking, although at first, we just missed out on one car park, but Mark turned down another road and we got the last space there. His luck with parking holds! When we came back to the car, we later found that we were actually parking in the courtyard of a church. Neat!
We walked towards the river and immediately were greeted by a glorious sight – a selection of beautiful buildings on the other side of the river. We crossed the bridge towards them, spying the Chapel Bridge further up the river, which we would walk over on our return. What struck me here was the sheer number of buildings, all with decorative exteriors.
It was a lovely touch and, when we got to the Weinmarkt, one of the main squares in the city, you could see where the idea came from... Many of the houses here used to be guildhalls, hence their ornate decoration.
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Tuesday 23 March – part seven: springtime in Lucerne
We wandered back to the riverfront, which was thriving. It was a beautiful spring day, with brilliant sunshine, as you’ve probably been able to tell from our photos. The temperatures were into the low 70s, which is much higher than you’d usually expect at this time of the year. As a result, the place was packed with people sitting out in the sun by the river, enjoying food and drink. It had a really vibrant atmosphere to the place.
I saw an Italian gelato store and couldn’t resist getting some, using my very broken German. I went for passion fruit and pineapple and the latter was absolutely heavenly.
We had already decided to walk back to the car via the Chapel Bridge. This dates from the 14th century, but sadly, although today it looks mostly intact, it was devastated by fire in 1993. That resulted in all but 30 of the medieval paintings on the bridge being destroyed. Looking at some of the remaining paintings, you can see what a tragedy that was. They’ve left some of the blackened ones, so you can see the damage the fire did.
Along the bridge, there’s a souvenir shop, where I picked up another magnet and outside was a postcard, showing the blaze at its height. The photo I took of it wasn’t the greatest, you can get the idea of what a disaster it was. Such a shame.
We found our way back to the car, more by luck than judgment, which is how we discovered we were in the church courtyard, then we had to battle our way out of the city, as by now, it was rush hour. In all honesty, it wasn’t too bad. The traffic was much worse coming into Lucerne. As we left the city, we commented that it was like going into a different country here. After all the winding mountain roads we’d had getting here, suddenly you had massive motorways. At one point, they went off in three directions, with two lanes for each direction, making a total of six. That’s quite a culture change.
We soon discovered that much of the road to Zurich was new, which meant Tim got completely lost trying to direct us. It also didn’t help that we also encountered some long tunnels again and lost Tim’s help. During one of them, I think we took the wrong route, but we thought Zurich city was the right way to go.
It certainly took us into the city and the amount of work going on here is phenomenal, with two new skyscrapers being built and a massive amount of roadworks around them as a result. We certainly got stuck in traffic round here and we ended up having to cover a massive circle, which was frustrating, but finally we made it out of that.
We made it to our destination and stopped the Holiday Inn and parked up below it. It certainly looked very nice and we made our way to reception. The girl checked us in, kindly offering me the chance to continue to use my very broken German, but I politely declined, as I actually wanted to ask how much the parking was and get an answer I understood!
She told us we were on the fourth floor, but nothing more than that. When we got there, we discovered that we had an executive room, which was huge!
The view from the room wasn’t quite as good:
Even better, it turned out that one of the perks of staying in an executive room was that everything in the minibar was free. Now before you get too excited, let me state here that the contents were only still and sparkling water, orange juice, Coke and iced tea, but heck, it’s better than nothing.
And still the surprises kept coming, when it turned out that they offered free Internet. You could pay for even higher speed, but I couldn’t be bothered and, to be honest, I’m glad I didn’t, as the speed of the free service was absolutely fine.
We settled down to enjoy an evening in the room, having brought up many of the remaining food supplies that we had brought with us. Sadly, most of the fruit had gone off, thanks to the mouldy three or four oranges (nice! ) so we had to dispose of those. So much for healthy eating! We also enjoyed one of the small bottles of wine that Mark had bought before leaving home. I figured he deserved it, after all the chores of driving earlier today.
Today we drove 177 miles. The weather today was warm and sunny, with temperatures in the 70s. The best thing today was the beautiful buildings in Lucerne. The worst thing today was how high we were on the road from Interlaken to Lucerne. Today we tried going to Bern And the result was and it doesn’t feel like a capital city. The most magical moment today was seeing Lake Geneva first thing in Montreux.
My thoughts as I started this update regarding Lucerne:
Very European, distinctly Swiss! The bridge is very interesting. Thanks for posting the history of it. It is quite a shame that it caught fire.
Nice room, and hey!.. free drinks is free drinks!.. and, besides, you brought your own!! And, yes, Mark certainly deserves a relaxing glass of wine... this driving thing thing can be pretty tedious!!
Absolutely gorgeous! I love the building with the crests and tree painted on it. How lovely!
I really enjoy all the history that you put in this TR. It's not just "hey here's some cool pictures", there's actually detail that you put in there, so I feel like I'm learning something, but in an enjoyable way, lol!
So sad about the fire. Losing pieces of history like that is terribly sad. I'm glad they were able to salvage SOME of it though. I guess that's better than a total loss.
I really can't wait to go over there, and to go to Switzerland. I have a friend who has family in Switzerland and they have an apartment somewhere there (I can't remember what city but I'll ask) and they've invited us to come on over with them some time next year. I wouldn't have said no regardless, but I DEFINITELY won't say no after seeing these photos! LOVELY!
Just catching up ! Photos have been fabulous. I wouldn't be able to get enough of the water views with the mountains in the background. Your sunset shots were Wonderful. The covered bridge is amazing such a shame about the fire.
My DD would love the green walls in the hotel room. I'm wondering what was hanging off the pillows?
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: I think he may fortunately have a spare pair, as we both bought a couple of pairs when we were in Tokyo Disney...
I have to say here that, while there are lots of cows to be seen in souvenir shops, there aren’t nearly enough out in the fields. 
Melanie
) so we had to dispose of those. So much for healthy eating! We also enjoyed one of the small bottles of wine that Mark had bought before leaving home. I figured he deserved it, after all the chores of driving earlier today. 
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