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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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[Author’s note: What is this post? Well, I wrote this not knowing whether anyone else was ever going to read it. (I edited it for you though, aren’t I nice?) I wrote it because I needed to write. It becomes the story of how my first Disney trip came to be. I decided to share because I’m personally always looking for more Disney stories to read. If it’s not your cup of tea (it’s very long, and not yet complete) I get it. No hard feelings. However, I hope at least a few of you will find it entertaining.]
I’ve got a Disney trip planned for just a day shy of eleven months from now. You would think that, given that huge time gap, I would be capable of thinking about something other than Walt Disney World. However, you would be wrong. I’m living off of Passporter trip reports, Disney Food Blog updates, and reading The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World cover to cover (thankfully for my wrists, I’m reading the epic tome on my Nook). I’m also, however, driving my family completely insane with my ceaseless Disney chatter.
Generally, it is at this point in my obsession that I would start writing a pre-trip report, but with the trip so far in the future, my plans are premature. Nearly every aspect is unconfirmed, much of the detail waiting on whether or not I get the job I’m currently in the interview process for. I’m superstitious enough to worry about jinxing my chances by excitedly proclaiming a week-long stay at the Beach Club Resort. Even if I don’t score the job, I still plan on making it to the World, but it will be in more modest digs and involve more counter service meals.
My solution is this: a Disney diary. Separate from my other journaling, this will be a place to vent my excitement and my musings. I haven’t decided if I’ll make this public or not…I’m tempted to, because I love making Disney stories available to my fellow Mouse obsessed. I have a tendency to start things like blogs (and, indeed, trip reports) but never finish them. I’ve never gained enough of a readership for anyone to mind, but it’s still embarrassing.
I’ll start in the logical place: my conversion to the Church of Mickey.
I never went to Walt Disney World as a child, so my first trip is more easily remembered than some peoples’. It was only a little more than four years ago, in April of 2009. I was 17 and had just dropped out of high school due to an anxiety disorder and severe depression. At my lowest, I was thinking about death and dying every day, though I luckily never attempted anything. It was a bad time in my life, but don’t worry, this story is where it all starts getting better.
In early March, my parents and I were fine tuning the plans for our annual trip to central Florida.
Yep, that’s right. We went Florida every year, but hadn’t set so much as a toe on Disney property.
No, instead we headed a few miles further down I-4 (me looking forlornly at each Disney exit sign) to the town of Lakeland, Florida. Every year, the Lakeland-Linder airport is host to a six day long, Tuesday-Sunday airshow and fly-in. My father is a private pilot and lifelong aviation enthusiast and Sun ‘n’ Fun, as the event is known, is one of his yearly pilgrimages. My mother and I are not quite as fanatic about flying, but we enjoy it, and the event, enough to look forward to making the eleven hour drive from Cary, North Carolina to Lakeland every spring. We camp in a temporarily converted cow pasture for a week, taking a tractor pulled shuttle the half mile through the campgrounds to show proper every day.
Yes, seriously.
Campsites are assigned on a first come, first served basis. You show up, pay, and plunk your tents down. Because of this, those wishing to camp, say, in some of the sparse shade or away from the noise of the 24 hour generator RVs, do well to show up a few days early. So our habit is to drive down all day on Sunday, set up camp, and do something in the area for a day on Monday before the show begins on Tuesday.
In previous years we’d gone to the Kennedy Space Center or the nearby flying museum, Fantasy of Flight. One particularly soggy year (for which I was, blessedly, not present) my parents spent the day watching people attempting pull their massive RVs out of copious amounts of mud. As entertaining as that had been, we thought we might like to go a different route in terms of entertainment this time.
Every year my parents asked my brother (though he stopped coming once he went off to college) and I what we wished to do on that free Monday. Every year, I said “DISNEY!” without much hope. I’m the youngest in my family, I figured that if they hadn’t taken me by the time I was a teenager, there wasn’t much hope of me going before I was grown with my own little ones.
I didn’t know much of anything about Walt Disney World, at this point. I was still one of those people who messed up which coast Disneyland was on and which one Disney World was on. My view of the Mouse House was cobbled together from episodes of television I’d seen where they make the trek to Florida. I knew there were multiple parks, but I wasn’t sure how many. I knew that Epcot was rumored to be lame and the Tower of Terror to be, well, terrifying. I knew you could ride Dumbo, because this was the attraction in the background of every single Walt Disney World commercial I saw in my childhood. Most of all, I knew there was a castle. I used to say, “I would give anything, if I could just see the castle. I wouldn’t have to ride any rides; all I want is to see the castle.”
I grew out of a lot of things, but part of me never grew out of wishing I was a princess. (Don’t get me wrong, even at my littlest I was always a bada*s princess who knew how to sword fight. When I played pretend, I befriended the dragons the knights tried to slay and turned them into allies. I rescued princes while riding a unicorn, but I digress). There’s still something intoxicating about the idea that, secretly, there’s more to you than anyone suspects. That really you are very special and destined for greatness. I think a lot of women still hold onto a piece of that fantasy in their hearts. Why else would so many brides opt for a tiara and sweeping ball gown on their wedding day?
That year, I was particularly vulnerable, emotionally. I never though dropping out of high school was even possible for me. I had no real plans and was feeling a lot like I had no real future. The princess fantasy was more appealing to me then, at seventeen, than it had ever been when I was seven. So that year, when I suggested we visit Disney World for a day, I didn’t have any more hope than I’d had in previous years, but I had a much greater yearning.
Maybe my parents sensed that yearning. I’m not sure what made this year so different to them from other years that they were willing to try Disney. But they did. I was beyond surprised when they told me, a bit more than a month before we left, that we were going to Walt Disney World. I never thought it would happen.
You see, my family is not unfamiliar with theme parks. We’d gone as a foursome to Busch Gardens in Virginia and had a nice time. We rode all the coasters multiple times and came home exhausted from our long day. There were many parts of it we enjoyed greatly, but there were also things we didn’t like. The kitschy, platicky feel. The pushy sales. The low-quality, high-price food. We endured all that for the day and had a good time, but my parents, especially, could not comprehend people who made a week-long vacation out of visiting theme parks.
As the emperor of theme parks, they assumed the experience would be comparable to all their other theme park experiences, but magnified. More expensive. More plastic. More pushy sales. And what’s more, the horror stories of massive Disney crowds had reached my parents ears. “How is that fun?” (I imagine) they thought. “How is that a vacation?”
So I knew they didn’t expect much from our day in the Magic Kingdom, but they were going for my sake. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be sad to only go for a day and I told them what I had thought for so long, “As long as I get to see the castle, that’s all I need.”
From the moment they told me, I never confused Walt Disney World and Disneyland again.
I was elated. It was the happiest I remembered feeling in a long time. They saw me smile for the first time in months. Planning our day at Magic Kingdom was transformative for me. Like magic, I suddenly had a purpose. I was no longer the anxiety ridden, depressed, high school dropout, struggling to get out of bed and shower and pretend to be semi-normal every day. Now, I was the self-appointed family vacation planner. I threw myself into researching Disney so thoroughly, it shocked everyone, including myself.
The first thing I did was visit the official Walt Disney World site. I discovered there were, in fact, four theme parks, a million hotels, 50 zillion restaurants, and a bajillion “attractions” (NOT rides). Faced with the overwhelming data, I fetched my mother, and went to Barnes and Noble. It was here that I discovered, what I consider to be: “The Tome of Disney Sanity,” the “Bringer of Disney Clarity,” and “Salvation for the Disney Novice.” You might have heard it called a Passporter.
We bought another guidebook as well, though I don’t remember which one. I don’t own it any longer and it clearly failed to make an impression that could compare with the Passporter. I loved everything about it. Here was everything you needed to know about Disney, logically organized, with concise but complete details, and nifty organizing pockets to boot.
Best of all, it led me to the Passporter community, which is the best group of people you can find online. I became immediately addicted to reading other people’s trip reports. And wouldn’t you, if the first one you’d ever read was CalderCup’s “Return of the Son of CLT”?
I didn’t stop at lurking on the forums, though. I Tivo-ed every Disney special the travel channel could offer up and inhaled them. Often, my mom would sit in on parts of the shows with me and say things like, “Wow, that actually looks pretty cool.” And it did. It all looked, in fact, amazing. We were awed by Expedition Everest. The size of the yeti, the ingenuity of the track— we wanted to do it. Soarin’, too, looked like an experience you’d be crazy to pass up.
Can you see the problem yet? Neither of those attractions my mother and I were so impressed by were in the Magic Kingdom. The more I learned about the World, the less my “all I need to see is the castle” axiom was true. But still, I could never, ever, bring myself to go to Walt Disney World and NOT see the castle. No matter how many hang gliding simulations or audio animatronic yetis you wave under my nose. No, what I needed was simply more time. I needed another day at Walt Disney World. So I went to my parents. Here is a reconstruction of our conversation.
Me: So Disney is pretty big.
Parents: …
Me: In fact, the whole resort is the size of two Manhattans.
Parents: …
Me: There are four theme parks.
Parents: …
Me: And there’s a lot cool stuff in those other three parks, too.
Parents: …
Me: Imagine how much we could see if went down a day early. I mean, Mom, we could do the yeti ride and that Soarin’ thing.
Mom: We’ll think about it.
So that’s how the plan changed from driving down on Sunday and spending Monday in the Magic Kingdom, to driving down on Saturday, spending Sunday in Epcot and the Magic Kingdom, and spending Monday at Animal Kingdom.
Other than the extra day, we planned to spend the whole trip in our usual way. That is, camping in a cow pasture. This would mean driving from Lakeland to Walt Disney World and back every day, which took about an hour each way. We knew this wouldn’t be any great picnic, but we were fine with it.
My father was explaining this plan to his friend, Pete (also a pilot), who is huge Disney lover. He and his wife have been DVC members for years and were, at this time, making at least one trip a year to Mouse Mecca. I wasn’t present for their conversation, so I can only imagine the look on Pete’s face when my father told him we’d not only be staying off property, but would, in fact, be camping out an hour away from the Disney bubble.
And so Pete and his wife, Penny, decided that we needed a little pixie dust. They had some DVC points they’d banked in their previous use year that were about to expire, and they decided to give them to us. They asked Dad where we would like to stay, if we could, and my Dad said he’d get back to them. My parents talked about it and decided not to let me know about Pete and Penny’s offer until something was booked and definite. They didn’t want to raise my hopes only to dash them.
In all my Disney research, resorts, of course, came up. The most jaw-dropping, amazing, oh-god-if-only-I-could-stay-there-someday resort, for me, was the Animal Kingdom Lodge. The idea of seeing giraffes outside the window I slept next to was pretty much the most decadent hotel experience I could think of. So when, in conversation, my mom casually asked me which hotel I would most want to stay at if I could, I replied instantaneously. We had already discussed earlier how there was no way an on property stay was in our budget for this trip, so I had no idea there was anything but idle curiosity for this question.
So the lovely Penny booked us a night at AKL and a night at OKW, which was all that was available at this nearly last minute. Pete told my dad that people often cancel at the 30 day mark and that’s exactly what happened. Thirty days out, we had two nights in a savanna-view studio at the Animal Kingdom Lodge. To say I was stunned when my parents told me is a bit of an understatement. My original surprise at even going to Disney was nothing compared to the idea that we would be staying in the coolest deluxe resort on property.
Our plans altered again, ever so slightly. We now planned to leave on Friday and stay in a motel Friday night. Saturday morning we’d go to our campsite and pitch our tents to claim our spot. Then we’d grab some lunch and head off to the Animal Kingdom Lodge. Now all day Sunday and Monday could be spent in the parks. This final iteration of our plans came to be just a few weeks before we left. I spent the remaining time obsessively planning, writing touring plans, reading trip reports, and annoying anyone in my general vicinity with a daily countdown.
[Whew, long enough for you?! If you’ve made it to the end, I commend you. If there appears to be any interest, I’ll post more, but I figure that’s enough for now, don’t you?]
MissFrizz
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"Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life...They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures..." --Walt Disney
I love your story...it wasnt too long at all. I am hooked in and waiting for the next installment! I never got to Disney until I was in my late 30s and had my own kids. But, now, 7 years later, we are living in Florida, only 2 1/2 hours from my favorite place with annual passes, and we are getting my daughter all ready for her move there with friends and her job at Animal Kingdom that starts on Saturday! Things can work out sometimes! I don't say tons on these boards, but I love reading about trips and things like that from people who seem to have the same obsession as I do!
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Dec 2005 (POR) - our first WDW trip and our first WDW holiday / Dec 2006 (CSR) - our second WDW holiday / Aug 2007 (POLY!!!!) - Happy Early 40th Birthday to Me and our first DELUXE stay / Dec 2008 - Christmas at "Home" (POP) / Aug 2009 - Summer in the South (POFQ) / Aug 2010 - POP! and Caitie starts her internship at WDW/ Oct 2010 - Laura & I "POP" in to visit Caitie/ Feb 2011 - Feb Fam Vacation to visit Caitie / May 2011 - Going to the Boardwalk to pick up Caitie (BW)
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" It was here that I discovered, what I consider to be: “The Tome of Disney Sanity,” the “Bringer of Disney Clarity,” and “Salvation for the Disney Novice.” You might have heard it called a Passporter."
I completely agree with you. I'm not sure I would have gone on my first trip if I hadn't found Passporter. I looked at a lot of guide books between the bookstores & the library & Passporter was the only one that seemed to be comprehensive without going in to so much detail that it left me feeling completely overwhelmed (*cough*Unofficial Guide*cough*). Once I had three or four trips under my belt I was & still am able to appreciate the Unofficial Guide but Passporter & these boards are still my bible & bible study group for all things Disney World.
[Ok, this one is a bit shorter, but this is it for what I've got pre-written. I'd like to work on it pretty steadily to I get to the end of the trip. I'm amazed by how much this little exercise is helping me remember. WAY more details than I would have thought are coming back to me. Anyway, hope you guys enjoy. ]
Despite being “late to the party,” so to speak, I wanted to tackle ADRs anyway. We didn’t score any coveted CRT or Le Cellier ressies, but what we lacked in quality we made up for in quantity. Well, no, to be honest we really did have more hits than misses, but I’m still amazed when I look back at how many table service meals I thought we could do in such a short period. They were as follows (though the specific times are beyond my memory, I remember clearly each restaurant we ate at): Saturday, dinner- Jiko; Sunday, lunch- Coral Reef; Sunday, dinner- Tony’s Towne Square Restaurant; Monday, lunch- Rainforest Café. Yes, we did actually get some touring done around all that eating! But that’s for later in the story.
I also wanted to plan a little surprise for my parents, to thank them. I wanted to order a small basket from the Disney Florist with a few treats and a pair of ears for each of them. The price for even something small was a little out of my reach, as an unemployed teenager, but when I told my godmother my idea, she offered to pay for half, which I could afford. I was so excited to be able to surprise my parents after they had surprised me so much-- first with the trip, and then with the on-property stay.
I think it was a relief to everyone in my family when the eve of our trip finally arrived (by the way, I still pretty much drive everyone nuts when I’m counting down to a Disney trip). We would rise the next day at 4:30 in order to be on the road by 5:00, so I went to bed early. I proceeded to lie awake most of the night, like a little kid on Christmas Eve-- except we wouldn’t even be at Disney the next day, so I was like a little kid lying awake the night BEFORE Christmas Eve. I tried to firmly remind myself that the Disney magic wouldn’t start for at least another 48 hours so I could get some shut eye.
That strategy kind of worked, but it turned out I was wrong. Disney magic was waiting for me that morning on the seat in the back of my mom’s RAV-4. Mom had made me a goody bag out of a reusable Mickey shopping tote from the Disney Store. It was full of silly things like a Minnie Mouse “magic towel,” Disney Princess hair ties, and a little sticker book. There was also a Wall-E beach towel (I love that little robot), a CD called “Julie Andrews Selects Her Disney Favorites” and, best of all, a tiny Dumbo plush that now sits in a place of honor on a shelf in my bedroom.
It wasn’t anything grand, or what you’d typically think of getting a 17 year old but it was exactly what I would have loved as a little kid. In retrospect, I think that goody bag was so special to me because it showed that my parents understood that going to Disney was a reconnection to my childhood. By fulfilling my childhood dream, I got to be a kid again, without all the anxiety and depression my teenage self was battling. I felt like I was being given permission to take a break from my sadness.
I decided to listen to the CD once and then save the second listening for when we were driving from our campsite to the Animal Kingdom Lodge the next day.
The rest of the drive, and indeed much of Saturday morning, has faded in my memory to a blur of happiness and anticipation. I do remember reading the entirety of Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” that my father had downloaded onto his iPhone. If you haven’t read this then you need to go out and get it right now. It’s a hilarious sci-fi romp that is especially perfect if you are an enormous Haunted Mansion fan like I am.
I spent another night hardly sleeping and the whole morning of tent pitching (which always seems to take longer than we mean it to) trying not to let my impatience show. Finally, finally, FINALLY, we were done, had grabbed a quick lunch, and were heading towards the land of the Mouse.
Passing through the Disney gates was the moment it all became real for me. I was really there. Even the Mickey silhouette traffic signs delighted me. I was sold already, hooked before I’d even gotten there. My parents? They were sold the moment we walked into the Animal Kingdom Lodge lobby.
We were staying in Jambo House, since that’s all there was at that point (Kidani would open later that year) and to this day I think Jambo’s lobby is the most impressive piece of architecture I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen La Sagrada Familia. But maybe I’m biased. Certainly there’s nothing at all kitschy or plastic about it. This was our first experience with Disney’s flair for emotional authenticity. You KNOW it isn’t real, but it’s as if the Imagineers have achieved something better than reality. (Although in this example, architect, Peter Dominick deserves the lion’s share of the credit.) It’s a storybook rendering that somehow rings truer in your soul than if you’d been faced with the real thing. I’ve never seen anyone but Disney do it like this since.
But enough of me waxing poetic (read: sappy) about the AKL lobby. Our check-in was smooth, handled by a pleasant girl working the desk as part of the College Program. Already from our limited interaction with Cast Members we were impressed with the service. It wasn’t that we had experienced anything tangibly out of the ordinary (so far), it was just that all the CMs seemed so pleasant. There was none of that “fake nice” you sometimes encounter in the service industry. Most of the CMs we encountered seemed to be genuinely good natured and interested in talking to you. It was a relief, in some ways, because we agreed that the rote, transparent “I’m smiling ‘cause they pay me to,” attitude always creeped us out.
Our room wasn’t yet ready, so we decided to visit some other resorts. I really wanted to check out the giant statues at All Star Movies as well as the Grand Floridian. My father brought along his DSLR camera and got some pictures of my mother and I posing in the Toy Story and 101 Dalmatians sections of the All Star Movies courtyards.
I was glad not only to see the fun icons, but to have a frame of reference for how a Disney value resort compared to our deluxe. Everything was clean, bright, and cheery, but everything from the color palette to the volume around the pool was very loud. It made us all the more grateful that we were staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge for our first visit. (Although, I have stayed at all three All Stars as well as Pop since then and find them more than adequate, especially for brief stays or commando-style touring trips. I was glad to have only spent one night at All Star Music, though, because there was a huge group of cheerleaders at the pool outside our room at 2:00 in the morning doing cheers at the top of their lungs. That’s seriously the only time I’ve EVER called the front desk with a complaint, as I was desperate for them to SHUT UP so I could get some sleep.)
Interestingly enough, the Grand Floridian ALSO made us grateful to be staying where we were. Undeniably the GF is very, well, grand, but it definitely was not our style. The manicured lawns and the just-so décor felt a little stuffier than we were interested in. It was a lot of fun to visit, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t (and still can’t, really) imagine paying more to stay there when you could have giraffes outside your window for the same amount of money.
What I enjoyed most, however, was hitting up all the gift shops. We purchased a doll and doll sized Cinderella dress for my Cindy obsessed cousin and picked up a lanyard and FASTPASS holder for me. My parents liked the looks of the FASTPASS holders, so they both got one as well. They clipped them on their belts, rather than onto a lanyard. I ended up taking quite a while picking everything out and browsing through Basin (I Basin). Dad decided to explore the resort some more while the girls shopped. In due time, he returned with a pressed quarter featuring the Fab 5 for me. Pressing pennies was always a must do activity whenever my family went anywhere when my brother and I were kids (something about cranking the machine is just the funnest thing for the little ones) but we had never seen pressed quarters. I still have that quarter with all my tchotchkes.
It was getting on past 3:00, and we were pretty tired from wandering around the resorts. We decided to head back to AKL and see if our room was ready. I was excited to see my parents’ faces when they walked into the room and saw the basket I had ordered for them. I’m truly terrible at giving surprises and keeping secrets, so I was pretty impressed with myself for not yet letting the cat out of the bag.
[If all goes according to plan, I'll be back tomorrow with another installment]
MissFrizz
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"Why do we have to grow up? I know more adults who have the children's approach to life...They are not afraid to be delighted with simple pleasures..." --Walt Disney
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About This Page: 
A Frizzy Disney Diary
However, I hope at least a few of you will find it entertaining.]
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Always studying for my next WDW trip!
Disney Magic - Oct 2015
Basin). Dad decided to explore the resort some more while the girls shopped. In due time, he returned with a pressed quarter featuring the Fab 5 for me. Pressing pennies was always a must do activity whenever my family went anywhere when my brother and I were kids (something about cranking the machine is just the funnest thing for the little ones) but we had never seen pressed quarters. I still have that quarter with all my tchotchkes.
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