Going north, south, east and west - UPDATED 12/18 - Page 36 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Great update, Cheryl! Sounds like a wonderful breakfast....thank goodness for the orange juice to help with the pepper! KSC looks amazing - I haven't been there in 29 years and I don't remember too much, but it seems like you're allowed to do & see so much more now. Can't wait to hear what happens next
Wednesday 22 October – part two: what do you mean, “it will start in 2002”?
Our next stop was the Saturn 5 / Apollo visitor complex and it starts off pretty neatly with a recap of the beginning of the space race, leading up to the launch of one of the Apollo missions. It’s pretty realistic and I like the way that they’ve managed to get real footage from that time, intermingled with effects of how the launch centre would’ve operated, right in front of you.
Then it’s on into the main exhibition area and I can’t help but feel that this is where NASA is missing out. Yes, the Saturn 5 rocket is incredibly impressive and no-one can fail to be awestruck by it.
Then there are the models and the rovers used on the moon, but somehow for me, none of that works. There’s a genuine lack of explanation about what we’re seeing and from having told the story so well up until that point, suddenly it all stops and we’re left on our own trying to piece it all together. One example was that I tried to follow the information about the various Apollo missions and found the details of Apollo 13 located in the coffee shop. Not very well thought out.
There were lots of questions that kept coming into my head and there were no answers from the exhibitions and no staff around to answer them either. Things like why were there so many manned visits to the moon in such a short space of time and what did they do while they were up there? We heard at one point that they were there for up to three days and I’d really like to know what they were doing during that time. That would be fascinating for me to learn more about, but there’s no mentioned of it anywhere. As a result, we probably only looked around for 20 minutes or so and we were quite thorough too. We were one of the last ones from our bus to get out of there, which I think says something.
We took the bus to out final stop at the International Space Centre and I was looking forward to seeing how this had changed since my last visit eight years ago, as obviously things had moved on considerably since then. Sadly I was to be disappointed there as well. The only new thing there was an observation gallery into the workshops, which are preparing items to be taken up on future missions. We were told that there were guys with white coats on who would be loading up things to actually go on the next shuttle launch in November, but there was no sign of them. I would’ve loved to have learnt more about what was going on down there, but it was not to be. The signs they had up, explaining what things were, were very basic, written in code, with no word to what those things actually were. Not very helpful. There wasn’t even anyone to ask either, as the only person in view was a security guard. Another good opportunity missed.
Once we had finished there, it was back to the main exhibition area, where we wandered around the various information there. What struck me was that none of it had been changed since my last visit, as shown by the board that said when something “started in 2002”. To me, that was just slack, leaving something like that so obviously out of date for so long. It almost felt as if no-one cared about the Visitor Complex, which was a great shame.
We caught the bus back to the main visitor complex at the entrance and they have added more here since the time we were here, but it wasn’t our sort of thing, with the IMAX movies, so that didn’t help. We went to look at the shuttle replica that they have there, but you can’t really see much there. At least here, they did tell you a bit about the inventions that have come from space. We had been saying as we went around the complex that we were surprised not to see more of that elsewhere.
Sorry you couldn't find the answers you were looking for at KSC. I don't know, I was just so overwhelmed with all the exhibitions that I didn't miss any explanations. It was our first time visiting, though, so that could be why. The huge Saturn rocket was my favorite exhibit. Can't wait to read more about your trip!
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Perhaps, in this case, self guided tours are not the answer! What you did see seems pretty interesting... too bad they leave so many questions open, though.
more great pics....thanks for sharing. I love how you've been compairing the prices with the DxDP......we are doing it when we go next year & to see what we'd be saving is a big help! THANKS!
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