National parks, natural beauty and a bit of Disney wonder! COMPLETED - Page 38 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
Registered Message Board Members save 30% off PassPorter guidebooks! When you register you'll have access to a discount coupon good for 30% off the list price of PassPorter books in our online store.
What a great meal you all had. We visited the resort, but didn't eat there. I wish I had known about the general store since it looks really neat. We did make it to the gift shop. Beautiful items in there but they were sooooo expensive.
I always love it when someone here says that they visited the same places as we did!
PassPorter's Free-Book to Walt Disney World It’s hard to believe anything is free at Walt Disney World; but there are actually a number of things you can get or do for little to no cost. This e-book documents over 200 free or cheap tips to do before you go and after you arrive. You could save a considerable amount of money following these tips. Perhaps more importantly; you can discover overlooked attractions and little-known details most people whiz by on their way to spend money. Click here to see free sample pages from the e-book! Get this popular e-book free of extra charges when you join the PassPorter's Club for as little as $4.95. A club pass includes access to all our other e-books; e-worksheets; super-size photos; and more! This e-book is also available for separate purchase in the PassPorter Online Store for just $5.95.
OMG, if you were trying to make me drool on my keyboard, you succeeded! That looks like the perfect dessert for me: chocolate cake AND mint chocolate chip ice cream, in the same dessert? Yay!
Can I just admit here - I was drooling actually when I posted the photo this morning, as I was remembering how good it was!
Registered Message Board Members save 30% off PassPorter guidebooks! When you register you'll have access to a discount coupon good for 30% off the list price of PassPorter books in our online store.
Sundance looks really nice! Glad you enjoyed such a great dinner with a PP friend!
__________________
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
Registered Message Board Members Get Our Free Newsletter! When you register you'll have the option to sign up for our weekly PassPorter Newsletter. It's chock-full of feature articles; news; tips; contests; photos; and special offers in our online store.
Everything is just beautiful. The scenery, the resorts, the food!...ok especially the food!
I can't believe all the stuff you accomplsih in one days time. And people say I go like a mad woman.
It really was a fun dinner. I got us lost in the beginning...if you haven't been there there are several cabins you can visit; one has the check-in for guests staying there, one has the Foundry Grill, and one has the Tree Room. In my defense, it was very dark! Mark commented, "Have you ever been here before?" while we were trying to find the restaurant and I thought, Uh oh, this dinner is not starting out well! Thankfully that was the only hiccup except for getting lost looking for the bathrooms on our way out.
I had thought Cheryl and her husband would be a little reserved and formal, but nothing could have been further from the truth! They are so much fun! If any other Passporters get the chance to meet up with them, you definitely should! One of my favorite moments of the night was when our main courses were brought to us. Mark was starving, but he looked over at Cheryl and said, "Don't you need to take a picture of the food?" and then sort of rolled his eyes at me. It was too funny.
I was thinking just last night as I watched Downton Abbey that I need to get back to England...
Everything is just beautiful. The scenery, the resorts, the food!...ok especially the food!
I can't believe all the stuff you accomplsih in one days time. And people say I go like a mad woman.
That day was a bit much - we could've really done with more time in the Tetons, but it just didn't fit into our schedule and I didn't want to be driving too much in the dark, as that didn't seem fair to Mark. If only we could've got another few days off imagine what we could've done then!
It really was a fun dinner. I got us lost in the beginning...if you haven't been there there are several cabins you can visit; one has the check-in for guests staying there, one has the Foundry Grill, and one has the Tree Room. In my defense, it was very dark! Mark commented, "Have you ever been here before?" while we were trying to find the restaurant and I thought, Uh oh, this dinner is not starting out well! Thankfully that was the only hiccup except for getting lost looking for the bathrooms on our way out.
I had thought Cheryl and her husband would be a little reserved and formal, but nothing could have been further from the truth! They are so much fun! If any other Passporters get the chance to meet up with them, you definitely should! One of my favorite moments of the night was when our main courses were brought to us. Mark was starving, but he looked over at Cheryl and said, "Don't you need to take a picture of the food?" and then sort of rolled his eyes at me. It was too funny.
I was thinking just last night as I watched Downton Abbey that I need to get back to England...
You do need get back to England - and if you ever do, we'll definitely meet up again! It was such a fun night and I'm so glad our plans took us within easy distance of you so that we could meet up.
Monday 12 September – part one: they don’t have much for lunch here.
It was a much more leisurely start to the morning today, as thankfully we had a lot less driving to do today. We had a look online at the journey we’d taken yesterday from the Grand Tetons through Google Maps and, unsurprisingly, there was nothing anywhere near the route we had taken, just as we’d seen for ourselves. It was completely barren!
We made it down to breakfast for about 9:00am and it wasn’t a bad selection, but as you probably know by now, anywhere that serves up French toast is a winner in my book!
All filled up, we headed over to Wal-Mart, as I was rapidly running out of blank CDs to back our photos on to (and I had brought 50 with me! ) and we needed some more discs for the video camera. We were successful on both those counts, but failed to find any lunch. There was a very poor selection of sandwiches and the only salad they had was massive and would have probably been refrigerated, as it was fish, so we figured we’d just find something on the way to Bryce Canyon. I guess if I say that there were two McDonalds on this section of street, including one in the store, maybe it’s understandable that they don’t have much of a lunch time selection.
We headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage.... packing Billy very carefully!
...and then we were off on the road again, heading south on the I-15. Where we joined, there were road works that seemed to go for ages, but finally we were through those...
Then we were back our into open countryside again, with beautiful scenery on both sides of the road....
Wonder where they were heading?
However, it’s fair to say that the scenery didn’t change that much as we drove along...
We stopped for gas in Filmore, like the character out of Cars, which was neat. $67 to fill up after 447 miles, which I didn’t think was too bad, after all the driving we’d done yesterday...
We carried on along the I-15 for some time...
On the way, we saw huge multitudes of cows, which made me very happy!
Then we turned off and immediately hit more windy roads, but once again, with very pretty scenery...
Registered Message Board Members save 30% off PassPorter guidebooks! When you register you'll have access to a discount coupon good for 30% off the list price of PassPorter books in our online store.