On the road (1) – Six countries, nine days COMPLETED - Page 46 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Hmmm.... sad story about foot-high chocolate rabbit. I didn't take any photos of him (me bad) and we went out yesterday with my parents. Mark had insisted that I didn't eat him before my parents came, so that my mom could see him, which she did yesterday. I managed to leave him in direct sunlight (stupid me ) and now he has a two inch hole in his rear, where it was burnt out by the sun.
Now he is recovering in the fridge....
Cheryl, if you could devise a way for me to eat all the chocolates I want and then stand in the sun to burn an inch or two off my rear, I would SO sign up for that diet/exercise plan. If anyone can do it, you can!
Am loving this TR and I'll say it again: you take the BEST pics!
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That's a REALLY cool museum!!! Now that I know it's all ramps, I'll bring Meri in the stroller, and hand her my iPod for an hour or so, so I can see the museum! About how long did it take you to go through it?
That's a REALLY cool museum!!! Now that I know it's all ramps, I'll bring Meri in the stroller, and hand her my iPod for an hour or so, so I can see the museum! About how long did it take you to go through it?
It probably took us about an hour and a half. I know we entered not long after it opened at 10.00 and I'm thinking we went for lunch about 11.40.
Friday 26 March – part two: some seriously stylish cars!
Once the first vehicles were available, you then travelled into the next section, which showed you what happened in the years 1900 – 1914. In each of these sections, there was a central section with cars from each period, with staff carefully watching over you. Woe betide you if you got too close to them! I saw a couple of people get told off and told to back off, when they stepped too near them and I can understand it, as these must be worth a fortune! Then, as you walked down the ramp towards them, there were boards the whole way down, explaining the developments in both the company and the world at the time.
When we first arrived, we’d seen a number of school trips were there, including one that was American (perhaps children of the armed forces serving over there?) and also one from the north of England. We did wonder what educational value this place would have for them, but there was certainly a lot for them to learn about the history of the 20th century. A few of the kids did seem to take it seriously, but unfortunately, the majority didn’t and were just interested in the cars. Understandable enough, but a great shame, as there was a lot they could get out of it.
After seeing the initial cars from the early part of the 20th century, there was a gallery off to each side, focusing on special subjects. The first was the gallery of voyagers, vehicles that help to get you around.
From there, we got some cool views over the surrounding area, although the design on the window wasn’t conducive to getting photos.
We did stop a real-life test track outside and I tried to get some photos of it, but it didn’t come out great. Trust me, it was a test track and we saw a number of cars out on it.
The next section took us through the inter-war period and this was, by far, my favourite section, as I just love the style of cars from the 1930s. As I said to Mark, they were stylish and I could just imagine going out in one of these cars, with hair flowing behind you in the breeze, feeling like Royalty. Ok, enough dreaming...
There was one in particular that I was really taken with:
The neighbouring gallery here focused on the gallery of carriers, looking at how Mercedes-Benz has helped people to do their jobs.
From here, the cars, to my mind deteriorated, as they took you through the 1960s, which, for me, was not the greatest design period for them. See what you think from the photos:
The gallery here focused on the gallery of helpers, looking at vehicles in use for the emergency services. I thought this one was very well laid out.
Then we came more up to date, looking at cars from the 1970s onwards. I found this section perhaps the most interesting, as far as the history went anyway. There were quite a few things from the 1970s that I hadn’t realised, as I was far too young at the time to remember anything about them. Of course, I knew about the oil crisis, but I didn’t realise that Germans had to have five car free Sundays where no-one drove to deal with it. The photos of empty roads brought it home to me how bad things really got back then.
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Awesome musueum so far! I especially enjoyed the glass-enclosed cars in the parking structure!! I bet the Test Track was cool to see too.
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Tanya
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Friday 26 March – part three: do I know you from a Bond movie?
The gallery here focused on cars that belonged to celebrities. Although some of them were German celebrities that didn’t mean much to me, I was fascinated by the car owned by the Princess of Wales, as I remember the controversy at the time of her buying a non-British car. It did not go down well. :
Other great vehicles included the Pope-mobile, the vehicles from the Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park and the one owned by Emperor Hirohito in Japan.
While in this section, I was finally able to get a photo, very sneakily, of one of the people touring the museum at the same time as us. Both of us commented the first time we saw him that he looked just like Oddjob, one of the villains in one of the Bond movies – don’t ask me which one, I only remember it was a Sean Connery one. He was the one who killed people with his flying bowler hat and we both said that we half expected him to pull out a bowler hat any second!
Having come right up to date with ordinary cars, the last section looked at the history of the company in racing and, of course for us, we were particularly interested in the Formula One cars and the one that Lewis Hamilton used to win the Formula One season a couple of years ago.
The amount of trophies they’d won was phenomenal and the gear that the drivers have worn over the years was also fascinating.
It was, at this point, that we had to hand our audio guides back and, as we did, we were told that we could keep the lanyards we’d had on as a souvenir. Neat!
Even once we exited the museum officially, there were still plenty of displays around the cafe area.
We headed back downstairs and browsed the shop, but didn’t find anything we wanted there. Anything we did like the look of was very expensive, shall we say...
I suggested getting something to eat at the restaurant and we managed to find ourselves a nice lunch. We started off with butter Brotchen, which was essentially a pretzel with butter in it. We enjoyed it so much that we forgot to photograph it and only remembered once it was finished:
I had a cheese roll and Mark had a turkey one, which was full of surprises – look at what was in it:
As if he hadn’t had enough fruit, he then had some more and I had this fruit and yoghurt mix, which was very filling. It turned out to be a good call to eat here. Sure, it was pricey, but everything we had came to €19.60 ($26.50), which was probably less than we’d have paid at home for something similar at a museum.
It was a pretty nice place to eat:
I stopped to use the restrooms on the way out and, as you can see, even these have a Mercedes-Benz theme!
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) and now he has a two inch hole in his rear, where it was burnt out by the sun. 
Melanie
PassPorter Guide Author
I saw a couple of people get told off and told to back off, when they stepped too near them and I can understand it, as these must be worth a fortune! Then, as you walked down the ramp towards them, there were boards the whole way down, explaining the developments in both the company and the world at the time. 
to remember anything about them. Of course, I knew about the oil crisis, but I didn’t realise that Germans had to have five car free Sundays where no-one drove to deal with it. The photos of empty roads brought it home to me how bad things really got back then. 
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