A Baltic boating adventure TRIP REPORT COMPLETED 11/19 - Page 43 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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.
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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Thursday 9 June – part four: the taxi journey from hell!
Now here is where the day started to get worse. We were going to get a taxi into Stockholm, and there was a taxi rank. The guys manning it told us to pick any taxi, and we’d be fine. Well, we went for the first in line, and he was certainly enthusiastic. However, I should’ve known we’d got a problem when he couldn’t understand “ABBA Museum”. We tried to tell him it was right next to the Vasa Museum, which is one of the biggest museums in Stockholm, but he didn’t get that either. He insisted on seeing the address from Google, which I found, and we set off.
I followed our route on Google for a while, and he seemed to be following the route I’d expect. Then I heard him point out the “Vasa Museum”. excuse me, that’s where we told you the ABBA Museum was! I asked him if we’d gone wrong, and he ignored me.
I looked on Google and I realised we were going further and further into Stockholm, and away from where we wanted to. I challenged him and told him we were going the wrong way. “Oh no” he confidently told me. I just as confidently told him that he was going wrong, and both Mark and I showed him our Google Maps, with the ABBA Museum highlighted.
He still kept insisting he was wrong, and he was taking us to Gamla Stan, saying that was the address Google had shown. I told him in no uncertain terms that if we’d wanted to go to Gamla Stan, we wouldn’t have taken a taxi, as there were buses running there. He kept carrying on about the address being in Gamla Stan, and we told him we didn’t care, we wanted the ABBA Museum, which was not in Gamla Stan. We told him to turn around and drop us off at the Vasa Museum.
He did it albeit reluctantly, and he argued the whole way there, telling us he was right – the address we’d shown him was in Gamla Stan, and that he knew every address in Stockholm. Well, he might know every address, he sure as hell didn’t know the tourist attractions. We ended up agreeing to disagree, as he was so vehement he was right. All we wanted to do was get close to where we wanted to be, and get out.
Thankfully, it was a set fee, so it didn’t matter how much driving around he did, the fare wasn’t going to go up, otherwise I’d have been arguing that point. I was so furious with him, and even as I was paying with the credit card, he was moving out of the way of a bus – with my passenger door wide open! The guy really was a piece of work – rude and aggressive and an appalling example for visitors to Stockholm. I was quite shaken up by the whole affair, as I have never ever encountered someone argue the point like that before. I wish I’d been thinking clearly enough to get his number, because I would’ve reported him, for not knowing the city the way he claimed and also for the appalling customer service.
Once we were out of the cab, I did start to calm down a bit, but it took a while. Using faithful Google (heck, it was more use than a taxi driver and I never thought I’d say that ) we made our way over to the ABBA Museum. As you can see, by now, it was a beautiful day, but it was still the case that the sun and cloud would interchange on a regular basis, and the temperature was changing constantly.
Finally we found the place…
Inside, the first thing you saw were these…
Now we managed to go in through the café, rather than the main entrance, and if we’d have gone in that way, we’d have had a separate line for those who already had tickets. Oh well, we only had a couple of minutes wait to get our tickets. They didn’t care that they were timed for 12:15pm and we were almost two hours early, which was good.
We exchanged our receipt for actual tickets and made our way in. We were told to keep hold of our tickets, as they had various interactive elements of the exhibition and you could use your tickets for those. One was a quiz, which I wanted to do, but I tried our tickets twice on two different machines, and nothing happened either time, so I don’t know what was wrong.
We were told to head downstairs, and the first area was a small exhibition celebrating 60 years of the Eurovision Song Contest. If you guys don’t know what this is, you need to. Justin Timberlake appeared on this year’s because it has such a massive audience, and it’s also probably easier for you to look it up than me attempt to explain it to you. Anyway, they had costumes from previous winners and performers, and it was a neat display.
Towards the end of the exhibition, they had these familiar outfits…
… and then you descended another floor and you came to this:
Mark actually moved the entrance sign that was rather inconveniently placed in the middle of this, so I could get a decent photo of it.
Very cool museum! But what a horrible taxi ride! I can't imagine where you would have ended up if you were unsuspecting tourists who were counting on the taxi driver to know his way!
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That taxi ride was unbelievable. Even showing him the map and he still didn't go the right way. Terrible! I guess they're not all London cabbies, are they.
So far so good at the museum!
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I wonder what the cabbie would've said/done when he got to Gamla Stan and realized how wrong he was?! Immglad you did get where you needed to be, despite his 'help'.
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Oh my gosh! I can't believe what a terrible taxi driver you had!! I'm glad it was a set fee as the whole time I was reading the account I kept seeing the meter ticking away! At least you finally got to the museum and were able to get in earlier than your ticket time.
That taxi ride is unbelievable! And with a set rate, I just don't get his end game on taking you for a runaround? Glad the museum was able to accommodate early!
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Great pictures as you dock in Stockholm. I can't believe the taxi ride! I would have been so angry. Glad you finally ended up at the ABBA museum. Looks like a fun museum.
Very cool museum! But what a horrible taxi ride! I can't imagine where you would have ended up if you were unsuspecting tourists who were counting on the taxi driver to know his way!
I dread to think. And he was so rude with it as well.
I wonder what the cabbie would've said/done when he got to Gamla Stan and realized how wrong he was?! Immglad you did get where you needed to be, despite his 'help'.
I honestly think he'd have still argued it and said he was in the right place. He was just either that type of person or in that type of mood. He didn't want to admit he was wrong.
Oh my gosh! I can't believe what a terrible taxi driver you had!! I'm glad it was a set fee as the whole time I was reading the account I kept seeing the meter ticking away! At least you finally got to the museum and were able to get in earlier than your ticket time.
That was the only saving grace that it was a set fee, otherwise seriously I would've caused merry you know what with him if we'd have incurred additional fees as a result of his lack of knowledge.
That taxi ride is unbelievable! And with a set rate, I just don't get his end game on taking you for a runaround? Glad the museum was able to accommodate early!
He was just convinced the address was in Gamla Stan, which it may well have been, but I think there were two roads of the same name. And surely all taxi drivers should know where the ABBA Museum is?
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We were going to get a taxi into Stockholm, and there was a taxi rank. The guys manning it told us to pick any taxi, and we’d be fine. Well, we went for the first in line, and he was certainly enthusiastic. However, I should’ve known we’d got a problem when he couldn’t understand “ABBA Museum”. We tried to tell him it was right next to the Vasa Museum, which is one of the biggest museums in Stockholm, but 
he didn’t get that either. He insisted on seeing the address from Google, which I found, and we set off. 
excuse me, that’s where we told you the ABBA Museum was! 
We ended up agreeing to disagree, as he was so vehement he was right. All we wanted to do was get close to where we wanted to be, and get out. 
The guy really was a piece of work – rude and aggressive and an appalling example for visitors to Stockholm. I was quite shaken up by the whole affair, as I have never ever encountered someone argue the point like that before. 
) we made our way over to the ABBA Museum. As you can see, by now, it was a beautiful day, but it was still the case that the sun and cloud would interchange on a regular basis, and the temperature was changing constantly. 
Justin Timberlake appeared on this year’s because it has such a massive audience, and it’s also probably easier for you to look it up than me attempt to explain it to you. Anyway, they had costumes from previous winners and performers, and it was a neat display. 
I can't believe what a terrible taxi driver you had!! I'm glad it was a set fee as the whole time I was reading the account I kept seeing the meter ticking away! At least you finally got to the museum and were able to get in earlier than your ticket time.
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