Putting a boot into our original Easter plans… COMPLETED 5/3 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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!
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.
Plans look great and you are certainly packing in a lot for your Easter weekend getaway. All the sites look good and especially Aerospace Bristol, which I'm sure was Mark's choice.
Yes it was, although I liked the look of it too.
Quote:
Pretty cool that this is the final home for the last Concorde to fly. I never flew on one of them but have a cousin who did many times for business trips to London. You get to your destination quick but there is not much room inside as so narrow. I once saw the Concorde land when I was young from the window seat of our plane. My parents were taking us to Florida. Pretty amazing to see.
We've been fortunate enough to see a couple of the Concordes that are still in museums and you're right, they're ridiculously narrow. One thing I do kick myself about is that I was once offered the chance to take an hour long flight in one free of charge and I said I know, I know. I think it was because I knew how narrow it would be. What was I thinking? I don't know is the honest answer. I so wish I'd said yes now.
So sorry we may have had the chance to hook up in Holland! But as I said on FB, I think I’ll likely be able to show you Easter is just a tad too early this year. Any suggestions for Delft? I think we’re stopping there on the way to Keukenhof as what I’ve read is the light is best in late afternoon at Keukenhof.
Your trip sounds great, and probably better given your ankle situation.
So sorry we may have had the chance to hook up in Holland! But as I said on FB, I think I’ll likely be able to show you Easter is just a tad too early this year.
I am so gutted about that and can't believe I was planning a trip at the same time you'll be there. What are the chances? It is possible that it may be a bit early, but I hope not for your sake.
Quote:
Any suggestions for Delft? I think we’re stopping there on the way to Keukenhof as what I’ve read is the light is best in late afternoon at Keukenhof.
Delft is one of the places I'd like to go to whenever we get to Keukenhof, as we've never been there, so I can't help. Good to know about the light, as I was thinking of applying Disney logic and going first thing in the morning....
Quote:
Your trip sounds great, and probably better given your ankle situation.
Pre-trip report – part three: a fairly big wrinkle to our plans…
So, as you could tell from the previous instalment, everything was in place and we were ready to go, but then there was a fairly big wrinkle put into our plans… in the form of my right ankle.
This is a problem that dates back many years. It may date back to my childhood, as when I was about four years old, I injured my ankle while jumping down the stairs (the silly things kids do, right? ) and my left ankle was bandaged up. I remember being in pain the whole time and telling my parents that the other one hurt and so does my mother. Hmmm…
Anyway, on Friday 13 October 2000, I fell down stairs at work and hurt my ankle. I remember the date clearly because of course it was Friday the 13th, but also because it was the day of terrible flooding in the town where we lived. I got home to a number of answerphone messages from people asking if we were Ok, having seen the flooding on the news, and I had to call them and say we were fine, but I’d managed to damage my ankle.
It healed over time and I thought no more of it. That was until I was driving home one day and a truck pulled out in front of me without warning. I slammed on the brakes and came and came to an emergency stop, but as I drove the rest of the way home (another 40 miles), my ankle was hurting. By the time I got home and got out of the car, I could barely put any weight on it.
A visit to the local hospital followed, who were useless. When they made the national news headlines a couple of years later about how bad they were, I remember my mum being shocked. I wasn’t. They sent me home with one crutch and told me to “rest it for a week”. I’m sure you can see what’s coming here. You rest a part of your body totally for a week and that’s it, it starts to lose its ability to work properly. By the end of the week, we had to go to another hospital, who gave me exercises to do and it was another three weeks off work.
After that, I had continuing problems with it until eventually I underwent what we now think were cortisone injections. I don’t know, as I didn’t want to know. I’m a big baby when it comes to anything health related. Show me a needle and I’m gone… you get the idea. I remember at the time that they said it should work for about 10 years and I think that was about 2005.
Fast forward to the end of April 2017. I was working at home and we were due to go out for a family wedding that evening. I opened up a kitchen cupboard and a tray came flying out of there. In the freakiest of freak accidents, it hit a small stool we have in the kitchen and ricocheted straight off it and into… yes, you got it… my right ankle.
I cannot begin to tell you how bad the pain was that night. It was horrendous. At one point, I took myself off and just sat in our car in the car park, as I didn’t want to be so miserable at what should be a happy occasion. We were booked to go to Iceland about a week later and I had to have special assistance in a wheelchair at the airport and took my trusty crutch with me. I couldn’t walk long distances.
Although it did start to improve, I had a feeling that this was the start of the latest set of problems, given my experience previously in the early 2000s. I made an appointment to see the doctor, after the problems did indeed persist for a few months and he referred me to an ankle specialist. When the appointment came through, I was surprised to find that it would be at the private hospital just down the road from us, albeit paid for by the National Health Service. Ok, works for me!
I saw the consultant and he wasn’t quite sure what the problem was, so I got sent for an MRI scan. The results of that came back and my consultant still wasn’t 100% sure what the problem was, which didn’t bode well. In his words, the MRI scan wasn’t “definitive” and he suggested surgery, although he warned me that he wouldn’t know what needed doing until he “opened me up”. Surprisingly, given my hatred of needles, I was fine with this, as by then, I was in so much pain, I just wanted something to cure it.
This was early December and I told him we had a holiday booked in January, so he asked me if 6 February would work? At first I said then remembered, we had tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil show Ovo (amazing – see it if it comes anywhere near you!) and for the Winnie the Pooh exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (also very good!) on 10 February. Without missing a beat, he said “27 February then?” I couldn’t think of any reason not to, so that was the date we agreed on.
Fast forward to the days before the surgery. The weather forecast was not promising. They were saying that we’d get snow and a lot of snow too. I appreciate some of you guys get a foot or so and life goes on. Not over here.
The forecast would fluctuate. One minute we’d be due nothing, the next we’d be due a lot of snow. As the date neared, they became more certain that we would get snow and a lot of it… I went to bed, more terrified about the snow than the operation, barely sleeping a wink.
When we woke up, we were greeted with a lot of snow. Mark was immediately outside and clearing the driveway, so we could get on to the main road. Bless him… look at how much he’d cleared…
We set off in plenty of time to get to the hospital in time for the 7:30am admission time we’d been given. Our road was Ok and the roads down to a certain point were fine too. Then they started to get worse. I will confess to clinging on for dear life, just praying we’d get there in one piece.
So that's the complete history of the ankle. It goes way back, wow! I wonder if you didn't have that freak kitchen accident last year how long it would have taken for the ankle to get painful again - because I'm sure it would have at some point!
__________________
Tanya
Every click helps feed .6 bowls of food to rescued animals. Give a quick click every day and help animals in shelters! www.theanimalrescuesite.com
So that's the complete history of the ankle. It goes way back, wow! I wonder if you didn't have that freak kitchen accident last year how long it would have taken for the ankle to get painful again - because I'm sure it would have at some point!
I agree. I'm sure it would only have been a matter of time sadly. Of course, once you have a weakness in your body, you always seem to continue to damage it.
I wonder if you might have broken it way back when you were 4?
My daughter hurt her ankle at gymnastics, and we went to the ER where they said it was only a sprain. She thought it was worse than a sprain, but after putting a wrap on it for a week or two, returned to training. A year later, she was having pain and we went to the orthopedist. He took an X-ray, and asked about her prior break. We asked “what break?” and he showed us right on the X-ray where she’d had a prior break - probably the year before. So, she was doing gymnastics on a broken ankle!
Hopefully this surgery will have taken care of it once and for all!
I wonder if you might have broken it way back when you were 4?
Anything's possible?
Quote:
My daughter hurt her ankle at gymnastics, and we went to the ER where they said it was only a sprain. She thought it was worse than a sprain, but after putting a wrap on it for a week or two, returned to training. A year later, she was having pain and we went to the orthopedist. He took an X-ray, and asked about her prior break. We asked “what break?” and he showed us right on the X-ray where she’d had a prior break - probably the year before. So, she was doing gymnastics on a broken ankle!
Oh my goodness!
Quote:
Hopefully this surgery will have taken care of it once and for all!
That's crazy about the ankle! I know that you've had a problem with it for many years in your various TRs. I remember that freakish accident you had in the kitchen. You talk about bad karma and the minute chances of that happening and what the tray hit. Pretty slim, but did!
__________________
October 6, 2017-Enjoying an amazing dinner at Victoria & Albert's with PP's Dot and Drew
My TR from my most recent trip is now underway. Includes: Universal Studios Florida, Disney World and Sea World Orlando Trifecta TR -Updated December 10th! TR is now COMPLETED!
About This Page: 
PassPorter Guide Author
All the sites look good and especially Aerospace Bristol, which I'm sure was Mark's choice.
I once saw the Concorde land when I was young from the window seat of our plane. My parents were taking us to Florida. Pretty amazing to see. 
I know, I know. I think it was because I knew how narrow it would be. What was I thinking? I don't know is the honest answer. I so wish I'd said yes now.
Like
Thank
Pixie Dust
It is possible that it may be a bit early, but I hope not for your sake. 
Good to know about the light, as I was thinking of applying Disney logic and going first thing in the morning.... 
In his words, the MRI scan wasn’t “definitive” and he suggested surgery, although he warned me that he wouldn’t know what needed doing until he “opened me up”. Surprisingly, given my hatred of needles, I was fine with this, as by then, I was in so much pain, I just wanted something to cure it. 
then remembered, we had tickets to see the Cirque du Soleil show Ovo (amazing – see it if it comes anywhere near you!) and for the Winnie the Pooh exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (also very good!) on 10 February. Without missing a beat, he said “27 February then?” 
Mark was immediately outside and clearing the driveway, so we could get on to the main road. Bless him… look at how much he’d cleared… 
Linear Mode
