A Magical voyage across the pond TRIP REPORT UPDATED 12/31 - Page 21 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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This seems like such a worthwhile tour with Lord Digby ding an amazing job in the history talk to your group! Very interesting with the connection he had to the bar in Margate you once worked out. Beautiful photos of the various rooms in the house that are quite well appointed.
Very interesting story on Richard Branson as I've always had the impression that he was quite decent, generous and down to earth as you said!
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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!
Oh my gosh!! What a cool experience!!!! We MUST come and visit you guys and you must take us to Minterne!!!
Well, you do realise there are simply hundreds of places just like this, right? Seriously there are... and of course, you don't get to go inside the house usually. Only the gardens are open to the public.
This seems like such a worthwhile tour with Lord Digby ding an amazing job in the history talk to your group! Very interesting with the connection he had to the bar in Margate you once worked out. Beautiful photos of the various rooms in the house that are quite well appointed.
Very interesting story on Richard Branson as I've always had the impression that he was quite decent, generous and down to earth as you said!
I would say both of them were. It was so nice to see, as I'm sure most people had their own impressions of a Lord. I thought Lord Digby would be down to earth, as at the end of the day, we're all ordinary people, regardless of any titles people have....
Monday 10 September – part six: the American link to the Lord…
Finally, Lord Digby spoke about his aunt Patricia Harriman, who some of you might know, as she was the American ambassador to France in her later life.
She married Randolph Churchill, the son of Sir Winston (isn’t it funny how sometimes you just come across the same thing on your travels?) in 1939. They had a son, but sadly their marriage didn’t last… something to do with an affair and massive gambling debts he ran up. She married W. Averell Harriman in 1971 and moved to Washington DC, where he owned a townhouse. He was involved in the Democratic Party and she went on to create a fund raising system for them.
Perhaps her biggest claim to fame, as Lord Digby explained, was that she helped to get Bill Clinton elected as President. She was one of a group of Democrats who worked to identify people for the Presidency in the early 1980s, just after Ronald Reagan was elected, as they knew they had to do something to rebuild the party. Clinton was one of those.
When he was elected, he asked her what she wanted in return and she said she wanted to become the American ambassador to France, as she’d previously lived in Paris for many years and was bilingual. She got it and, by all accounts, did a superb job of it. I liked to hear that, as I hate it when people get given a job for “being in the right place at the right time”, but perhaps others would have made a better job of it, if you know what I mean? Anyway, she was so influential in international affairs, that when she died in 1997 in Paris, Air Force One was despatched to retrieve her body. She then almost had a state funeral or certainly the closest they could give her anyway. It was a lovely story to listen to.
Once we were done being enthralled by Lord Digby’s talk, we were told we’d be divided into two and group 23 would go for a cream tea first, while we’d go on a tour with the head gardener around the gardens. I was looking forward to this, as from the description Terry gave us earlier, I didn’t think we’d have much time to look around the gardens and now we’ll get a guided tour. Cool!
We gathered outside the magnificent exterior of the house to hear an introduction, but sadly it ended up being a re-treading of some of what Terry had already said and then Lord Digby had mentioned. Basically, when Admiral Robert Digby purchased the place, it looked very different. There were hardly any trees and it was pretty barren with the wind whipping in. He even made comments about its suitability for a property. I think we heard the joke at least twice that he was some real estate agent.
Anyway, Admiral Robert Digby decided that he wanted to landscape the gardens. At the time, Capability Brown, an English landscape architect, generally regarded as “England’s greatest gardener” was all the rage. However, he didn’t want to pay his rates. Capability Brown was doing landscape work at the nearby Sherbourne Castle, where you remember his brother lived, so every time he came down, Admiral Robert Digby would go down and listen to everything he said and came back and applied the same principles to his own property. Talk about doing everything on the cheap!
Now, it was at about this point that the head gardener announced that we’d better get going, as we had a mile’s walk ahead of us. I think quite a few of us were looking at each other, thinking “I don’t remember reading that on the details of this excursion”. So he headed off like a mountain goat, scampering along in front of us, with the rest of us trailing well behind him. Someone did try and say something to him about the less able in our group being left behind, but frankly, I think it fell on deaf ears….
We tried our best to follow the mountain goat, but all struggled. Just to give you an idea, this is the type of terrain we were dealing with…
This sounds like such a great tour, with so much information and history. Hopefully you are able to keep up with the gardener for this part of the tour!
This sounds like such a great tour, with so much information and history. Hopefully you are able to keep up with the gardener for this part of the tour!
I love the tidbits of history you include in these reports!! I know who Pamela Harriman was but had no idea about her involvement in Clinton's rise. What a cool story!! I also love the name "Capability Brown". Was that seriously his name?!
That gardener is obviously thinking he is a gym class instructor!!
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Last edited by Tara O'Hara; 10-27-2018 at 09:39 AM..
I know of Ambassador Harriman, but her first name was Pamela. Did you know her only child, a boy, was Winston Churchill? Yep, named for his grandfather.
The fascinating history continues!
Ummm, yeah that looks more like a hiking trail in the mountains. Wow!
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Tanya
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I love the tidbits of history you include in these reports!!
Quote:
I know who Pamela Harriman was but had no idea about her involvement in Clinton's rise. What a cool story!!
Well, you're ahead of me - I had no idea who she was and in fact I had to do some searching online, as I couldn't remember her name, but I got there in the end from what I did remember from Lord Digby's speech.
Quote:
I also love the name "Capability Brown". Was that seriously his name?!
Well, I've only ever known him by that name! I just looked him up and he's listed under Wikipedia as Capability Brown, but apparently his real first name was Lancelot... nowhere near as stylish!
Quote:
That gardener is obviously thinking he is a gym class instructor!!
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We MUST come and visit you guys and you must take us to Minterne!!! 
Love the start to your Palo dinner. Excellent staffing this night! 
PassPorter Guide Author
Seriously there are... and of course, you don't get to go inside the house usually. Only the gardens are open to the public.
I think quite a few of us were looking at each other, thinking “I don’t remember reading that on the details of this excursion”. So he headed off like a mountain goat, scampering along in front of us, with the rest of us trailing well behind him. 
Someone did try and say something to him about the less able in our group being left behind, but frankly, I think it fell on deaf ears…. 
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