A very personal Decade of Dreams tour! UPDATED 6/5 - Page 39 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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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.
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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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Just caught up with your last couple of updates. Your dinner at the French pastierre looked yummy but I can see that while at first look it looked filling once you looked underneath it was not so much....Mark's looked to have 4 pieces of meat but the desserts looked filling enough and it was a nice way to cap off a full day (and a very long return train ride).
Mt. Fuji looked amazing, sorry you did nothave longer at the visitor's center but it sounds like it was an adventure (and I guess when you got to go - it does not matter the style )
Loved the pictures from Mt. Fuji - the scene looked breathtaking, I love how peaceful it looked with its snowtopped caps. Your lunch looked good, sorry your dining companions weren't more talkative but it sounds like a great afternoon.
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Your name actually looks like your shorthand to me!! It's all Greek!
Another fantastic update and I love seeing all the different layers of clothing you guys wore as the tour went on! Love the mountain shots. Very beautiful!
Great couple of updates. I'm glad you had a clear day and were able to see Mt Fuji so well, even from a distance. Sounds like your tour guide was a lot of fun!
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Friday 3 April – part three: packed in like sardines!
Again, it was about another hour’s drive to our next stop at Hakone, a popular retreat from Tokyo, which is home to Lake Ashi. Again, Take kept us thoroughly entertained on the way there, this time with displays of origami, making a cat’s cradle of Mount Fuji and the Tokyo Tower and then showing us magic boxes that can only be opened in certain ways. The last one was a clever sales ploy, as we were to see those later at a shop, so at least we knew what they were before we got there.
We stopped at a layby for a quick photo opportunity and it was a great location:
We got to the ferry terminal and it was on to the ferry for a 15 minute cruise across Lake Ashi.
We landed at the Komagatake Ropeway, otherwise known as a cable car, which gave great views of both Mount Fuji and Lake Ashi. Getting up there was a bit hot, but fortunately not too cramped and not as cramped as we would be when we got back down, but that’s a story for later…
By the time we got to the top, you could see the state of thing and we both commented that had we know that, there is no way that we’d have got on the thing. : It didn’t look good, let’s put it that way.
The views from up there though were enough to make us forget about the state of the ropeway. It was truly beautiful up there. You could see why it was a retreat from Tokyo, with even a golf course laid out beneath us, although no-one was on it and a few villages that we would later drive through.
To the other side of the ropeway building, the views were even more spectacular, with Mount Fuji visible, although now it was surrounded by cloud lower down. We had truly been very lucky with the views that we had got of it earlier.
We stayed up there for 20 minutes or so, getting photos, then it was time to head back down again. There was already a pretty long line when we walked back into the terminal building and, at that point, I did wonder if we were all going to fit into the cable car or not. Well, it said it took 100 people and I reckon they came close to fitting that number in, as we were packed in like sardines, with me constantly getting jabbed by a man with a backpack behind me. It wasn’t a pleasant experience and I was very glad when we got to the bottom.
From there, we had a quick browse of the shops, but didn’t find anything. I would really like a Japan T-shirt, but so far, I hadn’t been able to find one that I liked. They all seemed to be of samurai warriors, which isn’t really me somehow…
We got back on the bus and it’s at this point that I really have to introduce one of the members of our tour party, an Australian woman who was a travel agent. She was sitting just opposite us on the bus and she had a fairly loud voice and I think it’s also fair to say that we had heard a lot of her conversations at lunch and a fair bit on the bus. She was obviously very well travelled and pretty full of herself. She was taking this tour to size it up for clients and to suss out hotels along the way. As I say, she appeared to be very knowledgeable, but there were few things that were now being said that made us think that perhaps she wasn’t as knowledgeable as she made out. The first was the comment about the hotel we were staying in, which she was also at, not having CNN or BBC, both of which were available, as we watch them every day. I just thought it was important to introduce her now. You’ll hear more about her later on in the day…
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but the desserts looked filling enough and it was a nice way to cap off a full day (and a very long return train ride).
)
Claytrgtshooter (Minnie Lor's Hubbie)
Disney Magic - Oct 2015
PassPorter Guide Author
: It didn’t look good, let’s put it that way. 
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