Probably our last Disney trip for several years--PTR - Page 2 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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I definitely plan touring around my meals! HBD is one of my favorites. You might want to check what time Starring Rolls closes, as I seem to remember it being kind of on the early side, but it is one of the better CS options at DHS--other options for that day would be leaving the park and heading to one of the Epcot area restaurants and then going back to DHS after your meal. Being able to re-enter the same park is a great Disney perk!
I didn't think about it closing early. We'll definitely check into that! And with such limited time for the parks, we won't want to leave for a meal.
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Now, with only one day per park, we know there's things that we won't be able to do. Animal Kingdom and DHS aren't much of a problem, I find Magic Kingdom rather feasible without kids, but Epcot tends to be an issue. That's a big part of why I joined the Passporter's Club for all the handy dandy worksheets to help me figure it out! Thanks to those, we have our priorities for each park, what we want to do if we have time, and what we'll skip (along with a couple of things that I couldn't be dragged into!)
9/10, DHS:
Our absolute must-do's are TSMM, Tower of Terror (probably more than once!), Star Tours, and Rock 'n Roller Coaster. Toy Story is why we'll probably be heading out of Jacksonville as soon as we possibly can to get to the park early. We didn't do The Great Movie Ride, Indiana Jones, or Lights, Motors, Action! last year, so we want to try and do them this year. I *hate* that the Backlot Tour is closed while we're there. It was closed last year the day we were at the park, so apparently we weren't meant to do it. Everything else is a maybe for us, so we shouldn't have problems doing everything we want to do. DH isn't too keen on the idea of seeing a lot of stage shows, so Beauty & the Beast is probably a battle I won't choose to take. There are a couple of others at other parks that I would rather see. Oh! And Sid Cahuenga's? Gotta go in there. We will finish the day with Fantasmic!
9/11, Animal Kingdom, DTD, and *hopefully* Poly:
Our must-do's here are pretty basic: Kilimanjaro Safari, Expedition Everest, Dinosaur, Kali River Rapids, and Maharajah Jungle Trek, which SOMEHOW we missed last year. I'm pretty sure I saw that there were birds, freaked out, and marked it off our to-do list. There is no way (!!!) I am going to Flights of Wonder. I don't like birds , and birds don't like me. (That started back when I was a kid and a bird used me as target practice at Cypress Gardens.) We'll likely do the Pangani Trails again. Last year, we got into the park shortly after it opened, there was a 45 minute wait for the Safari, but the FP was 30 minutes from then. So we grabbed our fastpasses and did the Trails instead of waiting in line, which was PERFECT. Those male gorillas creep me out, though. Almost every picture I took, it looked like they were staring right at me! My two biggest challenges with DH (and the clock) do come in AK. One is Goofy. I've just gotta find him this year, and I figure with the smaller list of attractions in AK, that's the place to do it. The other is the two shows. I would kind of like to see them both, but really want to see Finding Nemo. DH is rather agreeable, so he shouldn't be as much of a problem as the clock we're working against. After we have our dinner at Rainforest, I'd like to head to DTD Westside to do some shopping. I would rather never wear "normal" socks in my life (ladybugs at the moment), so littlemissmatched sounds like a DREAM. I'm also bound & determined to get rid of my boring purse and get something cute & Disney. Hopefully DH will indulge me. From there, hopefully I can talk DH into going to the beach at the Polynesian to watch the water parade and Wishes, but we'll see about that.
Coming next...can we do all of MK & Epcot in one day each?
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We leave 2 weeks from today, so I've been picking stuff up for the trip. We got some Nutrigrain bars for the ride down and breakfasts. I finally was able to find the Brita water bottle at Target after striking out at Kroger (which has a digital coupon right now!) and Wal-Mart, so we won't be spending half of our snacks on bottled water again. Then I lucked out at my parents' house last night when I noticed my mom had a poncho she'd gotten for free sitting on the computer desk, and she said she had another one in her car. I'm still hoping the weather will be good so we won't need them (now that I'm cheering that Tropical Depression Ten has seemingly disappeared), but better to have them and not need them than have to buy them down there!
I seem to spend most of my time at home hammering out more details for our trips and reading all of my Disney books. I also check the Undercover Tourist app every day to check line times. I think I'm bordering on obsessive!!! It has helped with prioritizing and a gameplan, though.
9/13, Epcot:
I'm hoping to get most of Future World tackled in the morning so that we'll have plenty of time to leisurely spend at the World Showcase. Our plan as soon as we get into the park is to head to Test Track. We (stupidly) saved that for last last year and then were super-bummed when it broke down while we were on it and they announced that it wouldn't open again that day. We'll probably hit Mission: Space while we're on that side of the park and then make the mad dash to get fastpasses for Soarin'. Of course, by that time, it'll probably be late afternoon fastpasses, but maybe we'll luck out. We want to see The Seas again, mostly just for me to see the dolphins and manatees. Neither of us care too much about doing the ride for Spaceship Earth again, but we probably will just for the video e-mail you can send with your future and all of the rest of the stuff after the ride. I don't think we even set foot in Innoventions last year, so we definitely want to check that out. As for the World Showcase, we plan on doing the Kim Possible Adventure and Maelstrom, but besides that, we'll see what we have time to do. I'm not sure if there are any must-see movies for us, but we might try to catch a couple of them. Not sure where we'll try to stake out a spot for Illuminations. We had a pretty good one last year, but I'm not 100% sure where that was. All of my guidebooks seem to give different spots that are supposed to be the best, so I guess we'll see what's not already snatched up and go from there!
9/14, Magic Kingdom:
I continue to be somewhat baffled that almost every day when I check the wait times, I see that Peter Pan's Flight is the longest wait. Because of this, my gameplan is to head straight for it first thing in the morning (after breakfast at CP). We'll do that, Winnie the Pooh, and Snow White, none of which we did last year. After that, we'll probably head to Mickey's Philharmagic and Space Mountain, since I'm not sure I'll be able to drag DH on Mad Tea Party. I want to check out Tomorrowland Transit Authority, and Buzz Lightyear is a must! Now, if we were lucky, we'd be able to tackle all of that before lunch so we wouldn't have to backtrack, but I figure that's not possible. On the other side of the park, we of course want to do Splash Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Enchanted Tiki Room, Pirates, and Haunted Mansion. At the end of the day, I really want to see the Electrical Parade, and of course, Wishes in front of the castle.
9/15, DTD:
After our breakfast at Boma, we'll go down to DTD Marketplace and do some final shopping before heading home in the afternoon. DH will probably want to stock up on Mickey Rice Crispie treats, so we'll probably spend the last of our vacation money at Goofy Candy Co. We've both got a serious sweet tooth!
Now, I'll just have to spend the next two weeks doing all that last minute planning and stressing out that we'll forget something. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed that my store (I currently work at a Waldenbooks part-time) doesn't have its final day while I'm gone, though extremely possible. I'm putting all of my concentration into Disney and not the job hunt once we get home!
WDW - August 1997 Off Property
WDW - January 2005 AKL
WDW - May 2006 Pop Century
WDW- november-dec 2007 pop century
WDW- dec/jan 2009/2010 pop century
WDW- oct/nov 2012 art of animation
WDW- sept 2013 port Orleans riverside
WDW- july 2015 beach club
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Great plans. Peter Pan has a notoriously long wait time almost all the time. Your best bet is to walk straight through the park and then take the path the runs just to the left of the Castle into Fantasyland to end up close to PP. It is a continuously loading ride and shouldn't ever get backed up, but it does. Every. Single. Day. I would definitely plan using the FP system in the MK if you want to get all of the headliners done in one day. Check out the one day touring plans that are available to maximize your time--September is usually pretty slow, but the big rides are going to get busy after 11am.
I haven't done too much concrete planning in the past week--just reading more books and making more mental notes, but today is the day to do our on-line check-in! I'm waiting until DH comes home from work so he can join in the fun, even though I'm sure he doesn't really care about this step!
In the middle of planning, I found out that my store will definitely be closing in the next 14 days, which puts our store's final day right in the middle of my vacation. It's sad that I won't be there for it, but we have plans to have dinner sometime soon, so at least I'll get to see my co-workers after my vacation. My manager and AM are going to Disney in December, and my AM wants all of the details of my trip! It will be her first trip.
Maybe I'll just take this timing to celebrate at Disney. They need a "Starting a new chapter!" button
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Everything else is a maybe for us, so we shouldn't have problems doing everything we want to do. DH isn't too keen on the idea of seeing a lot of stage shows, so Beauty & the Beast is probably a battle I won't choose to take. There are a couple of others at other parks that I would rather see. Oh! And Sid Cahuenga's? Gotta go in there. We will finish the day with Fantasmic!
, and birds don't like me. (That started back when I was a kid and a bird used me as target practice at Cypress Gardens.) We'll likely do the Pangani Trails again. Last year, we got into the park shortly after it opened, there was a 45 minute wait for the Safari, but the FP was 30 minutes from then. So we grabbed our fastpasses and did the Trails instead of waiting in line, which was PERFECT. Those male gorillas creep me out, though. Almost every picture I took, it looked like they were staring right at me! My two biggest challenges with DH (and the clock) do come in AK. One is Goofy. I've just gotta find him this year, and I figure with the smaller list of attractions in AK, that's the place to do it. The other is the two shows. I would kind of like to see them both, but really want to see Finding Nemo. DH is rather agreeable, so he shouldn't be as much of a problem as the clock we're working against. After we have our dinner at Rainforest, I'd like to head to DTD Westside to do some shopping. I would rather never wear "normal" socks in my life (ladybugs at the moment), so littlemissmatched sounds like a DREAM. I'm also bound & determined to get rid of my boring purse and get something cute & Disney. Hopefully DH will indulge me. From there, hopefully I can talk DH into going to the beach at the Polynesian to watch the water parade and Wishes, but we'll see about that.
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