On the road (2) – beaches, castles and chateaux COMPLETED IN THIS FORUM - Page 20 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Tuesday 8 June – part seven: this traffic doesn’t look good :
We were heading for our hotel, and the sky was miserable, with not much to photograph on the way. At one point, the traffic looked horrible coming the other way....
Sadly, we were soon to find ourselves in a similar situation. We can only guess that it was an accident, as we saw three ambulances, two police vans and a paediatric unit head past us. Fortunately, as we went along, the road forked and it was clear that the accident was heading for Rouen and we were going towards Paris, thank goodness.
As we came off the motorway, we caught a neat glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
We headed through some country roads and finally found the Holiday Inn.
I checked in all in French, until the guy really started hurtling through something and then I lost it completely and had to ask him to switch to English! All checked in, we headed up to the room, overloading the lift as we did I guess we have a bit too much luggage then....
The room was nice enough:
We had to go out and move the car into the secure car park, so went down to do that and met a coach from Yorkshire and had a good chat with their driver.
Car safely parked up, we headed up to the room for some downtime and to get the day’s photos uploaded.
At 7.00, when the hotel restaurant was open, we headed down for dinner. We were, at that point, about the second couple in the whole place, but it got busier as the night went on, with a buffet that seemed to be for perhaps a company sponsor.
With English menus in hand, we made our choices – with Mark starting with tomato and prawn “en robe des champs”, which I couldn’t quite translate into English. Here’s what actually turned up:
I went for the avocado with crab meat with a spicy tomato sauce, that really wasn’t spicy and it was perfect. :waytogo
:
For main course, Mark went for the duck...
... while I had the scallops with rice and vegetables. Again, mine was superb, but my goodness, there was just way too much of it.
I decided to have dessert, if for no other reason that to try and cool myself down, as I was blistering hot from the two glasses of Muscat wine that I’d already had. I went for slices of pineapple with melon sorbet. When it turned up, it wasn’t what I’d imagined, but it was still very good.
Mark had the fruit salad:
In total, our meal came to €90 ($108), although in fairness, €28 of that went on all the wine we drunk...
I certainly couldn’t fault our meal and Mark went as far as to say that it was the best meal he’d had in France. Then again, there wasn’t much to compare it to, after eating at McDonald’s and eating in our room last night.
Cape Sud:
Appetiser 9½ 9
Main course 9 9½
Dessert 9½ 8½
Service 8½ 9½
Atmosphere 8½ 9
Value for money 8½ 8½
Average score: 8.96
After the amount of wine we had both drunk, it was definitely time to head to bed...
Today we drove 250 miles. The weather today was mainly cloudy, with some light rain, but temperatures still in the low 70s. The best thing today was the Chateau de Chambord. The worst thing today was it raining. Today we tried going to Chateau de Chambord And the result was it was lovely to visit, but it wasn’t as good as Chateau de Chenonceau The most magical moment today was seeing the stained glass windows at Chartres Cathedral.
Wonderful updates with beautiful pictures Mark & Cheryl. The stained glass windows just look amazing. So sorry to hear about you getting stuck in the car park as well as in traffic. Glad your meal was delicious, especially for having McDonalds thr night before. More please.
Wednesday 9 June – part one: how do we pay for this place?
It was a quick start to the day for us, as I wanted to be up and at ‘em to quote someone (can’t quite remember who though... ) and get to Versailles, before it became too inundated with coaches and tour groups. We didn’t do too badly. Having woken up at 7.00, we were down for breakfast about 30 minutes later. Breakfast was included with our night’s stay and it was a good spread, with cheese, fresh fruit, bacon and eggs, croissants, toast etc., although I personally thought the cereals left a bit to be desired, but that probably had something to do with the fact that none of them appealed to me.
We headed back to the room and picked up our stuff, with Mark heading down to get the car and me checking out and paying for last night’s dinner.
Then it was off to Versailles. The traffic, in general, wasn’t too bad, with one exception. It probably took us about 15 minutes to crawl through one set of lights, although fortunately when we finally got to them, it turned out that we were going one way and all the other cars were going the other way, which was no bad thing.
We made it to Versailles by about 9.15 and were parked on the third row from the entrance, with only about five coaches there already, which was exactly the result I was hoping for, arriving this early.
We grabbed some photos outside the palace.
Then our next challenge was to get tickets. We couldn’t work out which entrance to go in through, as they seemed to be for individuals with tickets, but finally we saw the ticket office off to one side, so we headed there to get ourselves some tickets. At first, we tried the automated ticket machines, which kept refusing our credit card. That was really starting to worry me – I couldn’t last another three days without being able to use it. Sure, we had other cards with us, but it would just be a real pain.
Eventually, I gave up with the ticket machine and went to pay next door, where the card went through with no problem. I assume they had a problem with the machines? Even here, there were wonderful Versailles touches everywhere.
We headed in through the entrance for those with tickets and, once again, we had to leave the tripod, which was a pain, and go through a security check. Of course, we came out and saw a beautiful photo opportunity in front of us. I managed to grab a guy who worked there to take a photo of us and we also improvised, using bags to get this shot, although we do look like giants in it. Maybe that bungalow for giants in Chartres yesterday was actually for us?
From there, it was into the tour and we picked up our audio guides, which were included in the price we had paid. It was pretty good and not too long or detailed.
The first room we saw on the ground floor was the Royal chapel, which actually covers two floors. You head up a staircase – we thought they were trying to kill us right at the start of the tour when we headed up there – but then you got another perspective of the chapel from up there.
The next room we went into was the Hercules Drawing Room, where the starring role went to the painting on the opposite wall, called Le Repas chez Simon, which was given to one of the Kings as a present.
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Wednesday 9 June – part two: into the highlight of Versailles
Next, we headed through a series of rooms, named after various Gods, as apparently this was Royalty’s way of showing that they were linked to divinity, according to our audio guides. It was interesting to see how they represented the various different Gods in each room.
Then it was into the Diane Drawing Room, which was Louis XIV’s billiard room, which was also formerly used as a ballroom.
The tour then takes you into the room of war, which is the prelude to the stunning Hall of Mirrors. Ironically, at the other end of the Hall of Mirrors, is the hall of peace, just to balance things up.
As for the Hall of Mirrors, well there’s almost nothing you can say about this room. It’s just splendidly decadent, with 17 different mirrors, all mirroring the windows opposite that look out on the grounds of Versailles beneath. We spent ages in there, trying to capture its beauty.
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I guess we have a bit too much luggage then.... 
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