Dreams do come true **Updated 7/24** THREAD 2 *COMPLETE* - Page 14 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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!
Welcome! We're happy you've found the PassPorter Community -- the friendliest place to plan your vacation to Walt Disney World, Disney Cruise Line, Disneyland, and the world in general! You are now viewing the PassPorter Message Board Community as a guest, which gives you limited access. As our guest, feel free to browse our messages by selecting the forum you want to visit from the list below.
To post messages and ask questions, join our FREE community today and you'll get access to tools and resources not available to guests, such as our vacation countown timers, "living" avatars, private messaging system, database searches, downloads, and a special PassPorter discount code. Registration is fast, simple, and completely free. Just click the Join Our Community link.
If you think you've already joined, log in below now. If you don't remember your member name or password, please visit our Member Name and Password Recovery page. You are also welcome to contact us.
Just got caught up! Great pics, and I love all the empty-ship experience! That's how we felt in Cozumel!
When you guys finally do that 7 day Western Caribbean cruise with us , you and Mark will have to try the Couple's massage on Castaway Cay...it is absolutely divine!
We were there so long taking photos that when we emerged from the viewpoint, everyone else had gone in for lunch, except for Mark, who was waiting for us. We quickly grabbed seats with Chris and Carolyn, who had saved them for us. Let’s backtrack a bit at this point. We first met Chris and Carolyn on the ill-fated Sorrento and Pompeii tour, when we sat with them for lunch and when we saw them this morning, we just knew that we wanted to be in their tour group, so we made sure that we were. They’re a great couple and really easy to talk to.
Now the food. I think I can safely say that we got much better food in Sorrento. Here we were served with fish salad and I was given a special vegetarian egg dish. Then the pasta came out. I had the vegetarian one, but obviously not the meat one. When it came to main course though, it was a roast before which was a no no for me and then the peas came with pancetta, so I couldn’t have that either. The only thing I could have was creamy potatoes and trust me, it was so creamy, that I think it was years ago that it last saw a potato. It wasn’t good.
While the others were eating (and Mark was causing trouble asking for second of the food, which he got, but I did hear the servers commenting about that in Italian!), I had nothing. I had asked our guide and she told me that me being vegetarian wouldn’t be a problem. Eventually just as everyone else was finishing their main course, mine arrived, six pieces of cheese. Seriously! Not exactly what I call main course, but hey, it was better than nothing, which appeared to be the other option, so I ate it. At least when dessert arrived, it was ice cream based, so I had mine and then I had Mark’s as well. I just about got enough to eat, but it was a close call and it wasn’t good that Mark had to keep asking for more food. A real let-down, after a good morning’s touring.
A few final photos outside the restaurant before getting back on the bus
After lunch, we got back on the bus and headed for Pisa. On the way, the rain that had threatened while we were in Florence (it turned very dark and menacing at times while we were there) arrived and we drove through some real downpours and saw lightning in the distance. It got pretty scary as we left Florence. I was watching the scenery and didn’t see what happened, but Mark told me that a car coming up to a set of traffic lights decided to stop very suddenly when they changed to amber and our bus had to swerve to avoid hitting him. Even worse, the car then changed its mind and went through the lights just as they changed to red! We skidded a bit on the wet road and for a second, it did cross my mind that we might tip over, but the driver held on to it and fortunately we were all OK. A narrow escape and one very stupid car driver.
This is how wet it was as we drove along!
More olive trees
A Tuscan village
Nearing Pisa
We went to Pisa pretty much along the same roads that we had used to get to Florence, so there wasn’t much to see that was new, but soon we came into Pisa and it was still raining really hard. We kept hoping that it would stop by the time we had to get off the bus, but no such luck. Great and our umbrella (albeit fairly useless and broken) didn’t appear to be in the rucksack. Hey, no problem, the second and I mean the exact second the doors of the coach opened, our problem was solved. About four guys must’ve been pushing at the entrance shouting “umbrella, umbrella”. Mark quickly bought one for €5, not a bad price and hey it did us when we most needed it. Otherwise we’d have been soaked, so that worked. At least once we had an umbrella, the other guys left us alone.
It really did remind me of Nassau and, sadly, that’s really how the rest of our visit to Pisa went as well. The place was just packed with people hawking souvenirs and umbrellas and it just gave the whole area a really unpleasant feel. It’s such a shame that the place was like that. It just made me feel really uncomfortable as we walked around and I kept a more determined hold than usual on the few valuables we were carrying.
Sorry to hear about your lack of lunch! but the photos and views are amazing! Did you have to restrain Mark when they said the square was the birthplace of football?
Saturday 2 June – part eight: been there, seen that!
Buses have to park at an area outside of the main city centre and the walk there was about five to ten minutes. Most of that time it rained, but when we got the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it did stop and started to clear up. We were told that we had 35 minutes to see the sights and do a bit of shopping, which was fine with us. We did lots of photos, both silly and sensible.
For those who don’t know, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the nearby Duomo and the Bapistry are all in what’s called Campo dei Miracoli and date from between the 11th and 13th centuries. The Learning Tower was started in 1173 and the tower began to slope sideways before they finished work on the third storey out of a total of eight. Today a massive renovation project has been completed to try and stablilise the tower to stop it leaning anymore, but already it’s something like 15 feet from vertical. We didn’t have time to go up it, which was fine by me, as that would be a lot of steps to climb.
It’s certainly worth coming to Pisa to see the main sights, but now we’ve been there and seen them, I’ve no real desire to come back again. There are just too many hawkers around and I didn’t feel 100% safe there. We had to keep more of an eye on our things than a lot of the other places we’ve been to so far and that’s not a nice feeling.
The Bapistry The Bapistry and the Duomo behind Fortunately we had a Disney photographer with us who could take this photo for us And the Leaning Tower of Pisa next to the Duomo The famous “we’re holding up the tower” photos! A series of photos showing how the tower leans as it goes upwards The shopping area around the tower
I deliberately waited until I had a bit of time as I knew I would have missed several updates whilst away. As ever, I'm not disappointed. The cruise sounds superb and definitely something I might contemplate for next year.
Love your photos of Florence and Pisa. I've been to both and I agree, Pisa is one of those 'been there, done that' places. I loved Florence though and would love to spend a lot more time there.
Registered Message Board Members save 30% off PassPorter guidebooks! When you register you'll have access to a discount coupon good for 30% off the list price of PassPorter books in our online store.
About This Page: 
, you and Mark will have to try the Couple's massage on Castaway Cay...it is absolutely divine!
Like
Thank
Pixie Dust
PassPorter Guide Author
It wasn’t good. 
Hey, no problem, the second and I mean the exact second the doors of the coach opened, our problem was solved. About four guys must’ve been pushing at the entrance shouting “umbrella, umbrella”. Mark quickly bought one for €5, not a bad price and hey it did us when we most needed it. Otherwise we’d have been soaked, so that worked. 
At least once we had an umbrella, the other guys left us alone. 
).
I would spend the whole day in Florence if we did the cruise again. I must admit Florence needs a good couple of days to see it properly.
Linear Mode
