On the road (2) - beaches, chateaux and castles COMPLETED - Page 7 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Thursday 10 June – part seven: these Cast Members do not know what they’re doing
As soon as it finished, we headed to board the next railroad train, which I’d been keen to do. However, this was disorganised chaos and the Cast Members really did not have a clue what they were doing. It took forever to get everyone loaded up on the train. There was one girl, working hard to fit as many people on board as she reasonably could, with three colleagues just chatting away and showing no interest.
Finally, we were off and straight through the Primeval World diaroma, but I stood no chance of getting any decent photos of it without flash.
We headed through to Frontierland next....
Then it was into Adventureland and another stop at the Fantasyland station....
The final land we passed through was Discoveryland with another stop – you forget how many stops there are for the railroad at this park.
Eventually, we made it back to the Main Street USA station and got off. It had been raining on and off as we’d done the circuit and the rain was back on as we arrived back, so we decided to abandon the idea of going to the Emporium today and instead headed back to the hotel, where we had an hour to relax in the room before dinner.
We headed down just before 7.00 and immediately we saw that it was a lot quieter at the restaurants tonight than last night, which fitted in with comments that had been made to us when we checked in, when we were told that Inventions last night would be very busy. It was certainly much quieter this evening.
Whew! Caught up! I finally made it over here.
I'm loving DLP through your eyes again, Cheryl. The parades look really fun!
Congrats on beating Mark at BL... even if it was "sort of cheating", shooting at the same target over and over! (hehehe)
Whew! Caught up! I finally made it over here.
I'm loving DLP through your eyes again, Cheryl. The parades look really fun!
Congrats on beating Mark at BL... even if it was "sort of cheating", shooting at the same target over and over! (hehehe)
Sorry, are you calling ME a cheat? I won fair and square!
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Thursday 10 June – part eight: one of the best character meals – ever!
As we walked in, I said to Mark that it was like experiencing sensory overload. The first thing we saw was the buffet on the right and it was absolutely amazing. I have honestly never seen a selection of food like that on a Disney buffet anywhere in the world before. The quality matched the selection as well, as it was absolutely superb. Look at the seafood and the desserts in particular – that was what immediately caught my eye!
We were seated once again right by the window, and ironically this table had a much better view of the Disneyland Park than the one we’d had in the California Grill last night. We could not only see the castle, but also the Main Street USA sign and also Space Mountain behind.
As well as taking that, and the food in, we also had the characters to take into account and they started to arrive almost as soon as we sat down in our seats. The first we saw was the main mouse himself, Mickey. Ironically, we’d only been saying earlier that we hadn’t seen him out and about much. I guess he must’ve heard us...
Pluto came next and he was a really good doggie, asking the table next to us to scratch his tummy and begging for attention. A word here about that family – we got chatting away to them and discovered that they were Dutch. It was a girl, probably aged about 20 and her parents and they were lovely, taking photos of both of us and also when Mark was up at the buffet and Minnie arrived.
As well as Minnie and Pluto, we also saw Chip and Dale and Donald in quick succession.
Someone was hungry and attacked the bread!
In between, we managed to get up to the buffet and I think it’s fair to say that I sampled most of the dishes that I could. It was all excellent, but some of the stand-out dishes for me were the sea scallop terrine (wonderfully unusual), the prawns, (of a size that we don’t usually see on this side of the pond), the vegetarian lasagne (unbelievably light) and the Bavarian exotics (a dessert that had a lovely texture to it and consisted of exotic fruits, hence the name, I guess?).
More characters were still to come, including the cat from Pinocchio – can anyone out there remember his name, because we couldn’t! :
But, best of all, I got more donkey action, as Eeyore finally emerged, after we saw him heading in for a thistle break a bit earlier. As Mark said, I wasn’t going anywhere until I saw my donkey boy! Twice in one day – heck, Disneyland Paris can’t be all bad!
This meal was not cheap, coming in at €51 each ($61.20), with the total bill, including a bottle of water, a glass of wine for me and a beer for Mark came to €124 ($148.80). Sure, that’s expensive, but my goodness, you got so much for your money, both in terms of numbers of characters, the selection of food, the quality of the food and the view outside. I’d love to see some of the Walt Disney World buffets being this high quality and would happily pay a bit more money for that. I tell you something, I’m never complaining again about the price of meals at WDW, as they are a lot cheaper than over here.
Inventions:
Appetiser 9½ 9
Main course 9½ 10
Dessert 9½ 8
Service 8½ 8½
Atmosphere 10 10
Value for money 9½ 10
Average score: 9.33
From there, we headed down to the car, as Mark had finished the book he’d bought with him and wanted to get the book he’d bought about D-Day out of the car, so he had something to read. We got some photos of reception on our way out.
Then we grabbed some photos of the hotel in the setting sun.
We headed back to the room and off to bed.
Today we drove 0 miles. The weather today was a real mixture. It was still warm and in the mid 70s, but rain in the morning, then sunshine at lunchtime, cloudy later, then rain and finally sun. The best thing today was seeing both parades very unexpectedly. The worst thing today was how tired I felt. Today we tried dinner at Inventions And the result was it’s one of the best buffets we’ve had at any Disney park. The most magical moment today was meeting my donkey TWICE today!
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We slept exceptionally well last night, which was a pleasant surprise for me, given that I was still struggling to breathe at night with my cold. We didn’t surface until 7.15, having gone to bed at 10.00 the night before, which I guess shows just how much we needed the sleep. We had done a lot yesterday.
Sadly, today we had to pack everything up for the last time, as we were heading home. I must admit that, much as I’ve loved road tripping on this trip and going down to Switzerland, it was a very nice treat to actually stay in the same place for more than one night. It had been such a pleasure not to have to pack everything up yesterday and to be able to go into the parks without bags.
We headed down for breakfast and this time, we were in the Inventions side, where we had dined last night. It’s a much better place to do a buffet, as that’s what it’s geared up to do in the evenings anyway. I had a lot of similar things to yesterday, although I did have some pineapple as well, along with some kiwi fruit yoghurt, which was very different and very nice.
Once we’d finished eating, we headed back to the room, as there was only one character to be seen this morning, Scrooge McDuck, a lot less than yesterday. When we got back to the room, we realised that we had already taken so much stuff to the car that we could do the rest in just one journey, so that’s what we did. I didn’t want to wait for bell services. I had no idea how long they’d be, but after some bad experiences with them in Walt Disney World (10 – 15 minute wait), I didn’t want to risk it.
Once the car was all loaded up, we headed into the Disneyland Park. Good grief, you could tell the difference today. I knew that the parks were a lot busier at weekends and even here, we had to line up for the Extra Magic Hours to have our ID checked. Yesterday, we had just walked straight in.
We wandered up Main Street USA, taking lots of photos, including some using the tripod.
At the top of Main Street, we saw some filming going on with a princess:
We then headed up towards the castle, getting more and more photos as we went. It was a beautifully sunny morning and was already quite hot, a real change from the last couple of days.
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Pixie Dust
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I won fair and square! 
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The only time I've seen prawns that big was on our honeymoon in Tahiti! And yes, I do agree that it gives the Palo brunch a run for it's money. 
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