Living the dream and remembering the Bagman LIVE UPDATE 10/2 - Page 27 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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
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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.
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So we encourage you to stay in touch with us and your fellow community members wherever works best for you!
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Sorry, to hear your t-shirts didn't fit, but at least it sounds the exchange will be easy! That's crazy with all these new offerings by Disney and how ridiculously expensive they are!
I know... sadly it seems to be an ongoing thing with Disney at the moment...
I am so glad we weren't visiting when FEA first opened as the waits were insane.
It's like anything when it's new, isn't it? I remember visiting Disneyland when Monsters Inc. and the Little Mermaid were relatively new and unless you got to the park first thing, you didn't stand a chance. Look at the waits for those now!
Pre-trip report – part twenty six: putting the remaining parts of the puzzle into place
Saturday 25 June
Well, of course you all know what happened in our referendum. I have been kicking myself for not loading £500 on to our travel money card, as I was given that option on Thursday, and they’d have given me an additional 10% of currency. I really regret not taking up that offer now.
As I predicted beforehand, after we voted to leave the European Union (a very sad decision in my humble view ), the pound crashed through the floor overnight. It went from £1 buying $1.50 to buying just $1.33 by the early hours of the morning. It recovered marginally, but I suspect it will be at very low rates for quite some time. I think this whole vacation just became a lot more expensive for us. Sigh.
Sara, our travel agent, contacted me yesterday, and as she said, thank goodness the Disney cruise was paid off a couple of weeks ago, as of course that’s in US dollars. I’m also relieved that our spending on the Baltic cruise was processed too. Had that not gone through, we’d now be paying another £60.
In other, happier news, our replacement T-shirts have shipped, so hopefully should be with us fairly shortly. Fingers crossed, this time, they actually fit!
This afternoon, I called Budget car rental to enquire about whether it’ll cost more for us to drive in Canada, as of course we’re booking a car where the rental starts in America and finishes there, so a website won’t know that we’ll be going to Canada. The guy told me it won’t cost anything more (phew!) but I do need to tell them, so they can give us the right documentation. I ended up booking our car rental with them for the North East/Canada part of our trip, and for Florida. We don’t have to pay for either until we pick the car up, and best of all given recent events, we’re paying in pounds, not dollars, so I know how much I have to budget for.
As we hadn’t spent as much as I thought we might on the cruise, I had some money left over to spend on this vacation, so I booed our Walt Disney World tickets. I went with the 14 night tickets that you can buy in the UK, which is the first time in I don’t know how many years that I’ve done that. Usually, it’s cheaper for us to get the annual passes with our Disney Vacation Club discount, but with the way the dollar is, that was definitely not an option. Frankly, it hadn’t been for a few months, as we hadn’t been doing that well against the dollar. The British offer was pretty good because, as I know I’ve mentioned before, you got Memory Maker free of charge with it, which we would’ve paid for, so I was happy with that.
I also went ahead and booked our hotel for New York. I ended up going for the Hilton Times Square, after reading quite a few different reviews. It doesn’t come with breakfast, but then again, I’m sure there will be plenty of options nearby. I did look at the Hilton website, but given the falling pound, that was way more expensive that Hotels.com and I was able to apply my free night to my booking to make for a really cheap night’s stay in the centre of the Big Apple.
I was going to book our two night stay in Toronto, but when I checked the prices, I was horrified when I saw the prices. They were about £250 the last time I looked, now they’re £400. I wasn’t expecting that. I decided to shop around, and did find a couple of bed and breakfast places on Hotels.com, but I wasn’t overly keen on either. There was one I really liked, but it had no rooms and another only had a twin room.
I then had a look on TripAdvisor for bed and breakfast places, and found quite a few I liked. Some were too far out, while others had no availability. It wasn’t looking promising, which was a huge shame, given they were about half the price of the various hotels I was seeing. I did end up emailing one bed and breakfast place, as they didn’t have online booking, so we’ll see if they have any availability. If not, I guess I’ll be shelling out £400…
Sunday 26 June
I didn’t get that much further today, as I’m still waiting to hear back from the B&B I emailed in Toronto, but frankly I’m giving up hope I’ll ever hear back from them.
Instead, I went ahead and booked our tickets for both the One World Observatory and the 9/11 memorial and museum. After much thought, I went for the One World Observatory first, as both do timed tickets. I figured there’d probably be a longer line for an observatory, and given we’re visiting on a Saturday, I wanted to get in there early. We’re booked for 9:00am, which is when it opens, so hopefully we won’t have any issues. As there isn’t normally that much reason to spend too much time in an observatory (after all, you see the same thing once you’ve taken in the view once, unless the scenery is changing – for example the sun is setting – and there are only so many photos you can take, and I really did just say that! ), I figured an hour would be plenty, so I got our tickets for the museum for 10:00am.
I am really looking forward to doing both, although I do have mixed feelings about it, given the site’s history. It will be interesting to see how we both feel on the day. We visited the World Trade Center together on our honeymoon in November 1999. It was part of a pass I’d already purchased, so we went up, even though the forecast was lousy. Sure enough, I literally got about two or three shots before the cloud came in and we then didn’t see a thing. At the time, Mark was like “why did we come here?” and my answer was pretty much because we’d already paid for it. Nearly two years later, when the towers collapsed, Mark said to me “I’m so glad we went there”. I was glad I’d taken him too.
I went first with my parents in 1987, and no-one had ever heard of the World Trade Center back then in the UK. If you went to New York City, and you were going to go up any time, it was the Empire State Building, and that was it. I don’t even remember whether you could go up the Rockefeller Center, but if you could, people knew nothing about that either. I then went back up in 1996, when I visited the city on my own. I was staying with my friend Dave who was then living in Philadelphia (if you read my trip reports, it was his wedding in Boston last September and we’ll be spending our first night of this trip with him and his husband ), and took day trips on Amtrak to both NYC and DC, which was a huge amount of fun. I loved being able to just head out on my own, and being an only child, I was pretty independent. People did think I was nuts doing it, but I was always out in daylight, and I never felt in danger. It was just a fun adventure back then.
Monday 27 June
Someone posted a link to a wonderful article on the Disney Parks Blog: Macarons or Macaroons? As well as explaining the difference (I like both, but prefer macarons), they also say where you can find them. Apparently Amorette’s Patisserie has them at Disney Springs. Right, I’ll be checking that out then… I wasn’t surprised to learn the other places that have them are in the France pavilion at Epcot, and I already had those on my radar.
Something else we may end up doing at Disney Springs is the Characters at Flight balloon ride at night. Someone mentioned it on my trip report today, which was all about the Panoramagique balloon at Disneyland Paris, and they commented that the night-time view from Characters in Flight was pretty neat. Hmmm…. Maybe that’s worth doing after our dinner at Morimoto Asia? Something to keep in mind.
And, best of all, Sharon (Princess Sharon) is back on the boards. She posted an update to her Disneyland trip report, and it’s ironic, as I was literally only thinking about her yesterday. We’d talked about this trip when we last saw her (the Disneyland trip last September) and she was going to come and join us for the Montreal section, so I took the opportunity to ask her if she was still up for that. She asked for the dates, and she’ll come back to me. Hopefully she will be able to come along, as it’ll be lovely to see her again.
Tuesday 28 June
After much debate with myself, and asking questions on the boards, I’ve finally settled on our hotel for Toronto. I spent a long time looking at options further out from the city, but the advice I got was that driving isn’t that great, and it’s better to use public transport. There were some hotels near public transport, albeit further out, but in the end I opted for the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown, which is only about 10-15 minutes’ walk from the CN Tower.
I figured that would work, as I’ve also just booked us dinner at 360 The Restaurant at the CN Tower, as it had some good reviews, and you get to go up to the viewing platform after your meal. Sure, it doesn’t come cheap at $79 CAD per person for a three course dinner, but then again, just to go up to the viewing platform is $35 CAD per person, so really you’re getting a meal for $45 each, which I didn’t think was too bad. After dinner, I figured we’d want to just be able to stagger back to our hotel, and it’s not too far from where the Cirque du Soleil show is, so we’ll probably take a taxi there and back.
I did look at getting the Toronto CityPass, and it looked like a very good deal… until I realised I was pricing it up in US dollars, rather than Canadian ones. Suddenly, it wasn’t such a great deal. I knew we’d be going to Casa Loma and the Royal Ontario Museum, and maybe we might do the CN Tower the next day in daylight hours, but for the pass to pay for itself, you needed to use it for four attractions, not three, so that wasn’t an option.
Too bad it's been so difficult finding accommodations!
I went to the site of the Trade Towers 14 months after 9/11, and I can tell you, it was VERY emotional for me. In some ways, I think it would be easier going now, as when I was there it was still a lot of rubble. Seeing something standing seems more hopeful somehow, if you know what I mean?
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Sounds like your plans are really coming together! Glad to see that you booked the Hilton Garden Inn in Toronto as it seems close to the sightseeing options. We have always enjoyed our stays in their hotels so I don't think you'll be disappointed. It sounds like the wait times for Frozen Ever After have gotten a little better, so hopefully when you're there, you might even be able to go on it for a standby if you really enjoyed it with your Fast Pass! So happy to hear that the T-shirt company gave you such great customer service. Hopefully your new shirts will be a better fit for you and Mark!
Your hotel in Toronto is really close to Wayne Gretzky's restaurant! Just FYI. Should be an easy walk to CN Tower.
I've yet to visit the new One World area in NY. I imagine it'll be strange, maybe for you too. I happened to visit the Top of the World in June of that year, a mother-daughter trip with my mom. Like Mark said, I'm glad we squeezed that into our trip.
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Too bad it's been so difficult finding accommodations!
I went to the site of the Trade Towers 14 months after 9/11, and I can tell you, it was VERY emotional for me. In some ways, I think it would be easier going now, as when I was there it was still a lot of rubble. Seeing something standing seems more hopeful somehow, if you know what I mean?
Oh my goodness, I can't even begin to imagine what that was like. I suspect now it probably is more hopeful.
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That's crazy with all these new offerings by Disney and how ridiculously expensive they are! 
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), the pound crashed through the floor overnight. It went from £1 buying $1.50 to buying just $1.33 by the early hours of the morning. It recovered marginally, but I suspect it will be at very low rates for quite some time. I think this whole vacation just became a lot more expensive for us. Sigh. 
Frankly, it hadn’t been for a few months, as we hadn’t been doing that well against the dollar. The British offer was pretty good because, as I know I’ve mentioned before, you got Memory Maker free of charge with it, which we would’ve paid for, so I was happy with that. 
I really did just say that! 
), I figured an hour would be plenty, so I got our tickets for the museum for 10:00am. 
), and took day trips on Amtrak to both NYC and DC, which was a huge amount of fun. I loved being able to just head out on my own, and being an only child, I was pretty independent. People did think I was nuts doing it, but I was always out in daylight, and I never felt in danger. It was just a fun adventure back then. 
I wasn’t surprised to learn the other places that have them are in the France pavilion at Epcot, and I already had those on my radar. 
She posted an update to her Disneyland trip report, and it’s ironic, as I was literally only thinking about her yesterday. We’d talked about this trip when we last saw her (the Disneyland trip last September) and she was going to come and join us for the Montreal section, so I took the opportunity to ask her if she was still up for that. She asked for the dates, and she’ll come back to me. Hopefully she will be able to come along, as it’ll be lovely to see her again. 
Suddenly, it wasn’t such a great deal. I knew we’d be going to Casa Loma and the Royal Ontario Museum, and maybe we might do the CN Tower the next day in daylight hours, but for the pass to pay for itself, you needed to use it for four attractions, not three, so that wasn’t an option. 
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