A Scottish right Royal time! TRIP REPORT COMPLETED 1/10 - Page 4 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Sounds like some great possible plans for departure day. Hope you get to do a lot of this, depending on time you have but good thing you have a very late flight to accomplish a lot. I think you'll need the late start after the show the night before. I think I have been to Yo Sushi and it may have been in Dublin. If that was the place, I know I enjoyed it very much. If I'm correct the sushi choices are on conveyors and you just pick and choose and they are labeled by color.
Yes that's the place! We had an interesting time there, shall we say? More to come in due course in the trip report...
Well, we're back and we had a wonderful time, but very different to this trip report, let's just put it that way. Not different bad, just different. There were a lot of things on the list we didn't get to do, but equally we did a lot of other things, some of which I thought of at the last minute and other things I didn't plan at all, which was fun.
The trip report will take a while to get underway, as I'm still writing it and I want to try and do it with Flickr, so we'll see how long it takes me to master that. Bear with me, I'll get going as soon as I can.
Welcome home! Sounds like you had to wing it a little bit - but glad to hear it worked out.
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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
Well I'm intrigued by the "different" comment. All the pics on FB over the weekend looked great, and from those, I can't decipher what you might be referencing. I'll look forward to reading the TR when you're ready!
Well I'm intrigued by the "different" comment. All the pics on FB over the weekend looked great, and from those, I can't decipher what you might be referencing. I'll look forward to reading the TR when you're ready!
Hopefully it will be up and running fairly soon... I'm just trying to wrap my head around Flickr...
Glad you seemed to enjoy it and looking forward to the TR! Good time to test Flikr on a much shorter TR!
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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!
Glad you are home and that you enjoyed the weekend. Hope you and Flickr get along so we can read all about it.
So far (fingers crossed) so good. It's not like Photobucket, but I'm getting there and I think it's almost as quick, it's just a different way of doing things...
Glad you seemed to enjoy it and looking forward to the TR! Good time to test Flikr on a much shorter TR!
That's exactly what I thought. There's this one, then the next one will be a week long trip when Jan comes over here, so that should give me some practice before our two and a half week trip to Disney and our Southern Caribbean cruise in January.
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Ok, time to get this show on the road, now I've hopefully mastered Flickr...
Saturday 26 August – part one: a proper breakfast? I don’t think so!
I really didn’t want to know when Mark told me it was 4:20am, and the alarm was due to go off in 10 minutes’ time. Somehow, when I booked a flight at 8:25am, it seemed like a good idea, but of course you need to be at the airport a couple of hours beforehand, and it’s a 40 minute drive from our house, and you need to get yourself going before that, hence the 4:30am alarm call.
We were out of the house just after 5:00am into pretty much pitch black. Ok, great, so the nights really are drawing in now.
We set off, and thankfully had no issues whatsoever getting to the airport, although there was more traffic than you’d usually expect at this hour of the morning on a weekend. I guess that’s what happens when you fly over a Bank Holiday weekend. I wouldn’t have gone up last night, because they were forecasting massive delays on the roads, but I must confess I felt much better when we actually got to the airport. I guess I’ve got so used to staying the night before up there that I forget about all the stress it can add when you’re trying to make it there on the day of a flight. That does it, even though our flight to Orlando isn’t until 1:00pm in January, we’re definitely staying the night before up at the airport.
We pulled into the short stay car park I’d booked just before 6:00am, and thankfully the car registration number was recognised, otherwise I’d have to put our booking reference number in when we returned. At least I don’t have to do that now.
We headed into the car park right next to the terminal, as it said it had spaces, but I must admit as we went past every level, and they all said they were full, I did start to worry. If we had to drive back out and go to the next car park, that would add a lot of time…
Fortunately, there were plenty of spaces on the roof, and even better this was departures level, so it was literally just a quick walk over to the terminal.
My bag got selected for some extra love and care, shall we say? Something to do with the fact I had a roll-on (freezing gel for my ankle) and a balm in my luggage and not in my liquids bag. I genuinely thought the balm would be fine, and as for the roll-on, well let’s just say it travelled twice through Heathrow with me in May to Newcastle and Reykjavik and no-one else picked it up. That’s a bit bad…
We were through security by 6:10am, which of course left us loads of time (two and a quarter hours of it) before our flight. Isn’t it always the way? If we’d have been later, then you know we’d have had a long wait at security. Oh well.
Plenty of time for breakfast at least! We headed upstairs, and the first restaurant we passed was besieged with people. The lines were insane. I figured it was because they were right at the top of the stairs, and of course that was the case, as the other places were much quieter. I was heading for Café Rouge, a French place, which I really like, but it’s been replaced by a Japanese restaurant, Wagamama. Now I like this place, but not for breakfast.
The only option left was Jamie’s Italian. It promised a “proper” breakfast, but frankly the menu wasn’t overly inspiring, and when we arrived, we were promptly told there would be at least a 10-15 minute wait for food. Just as well we have lots of time then…
I went for the warm croissant, and look at the size of the thing! I only wanted something light, and there was no way I could eat of all of it.
Mark had the full monty, made up of two free-range sausages, crispy smoked bacon, black pudding (he asked for it to be left off, but it still arrived with it ), free range eggs, golden potatoes with sticky onions, roast tomatoes, brown cap mushrooms, and baked beans, and although it looked good to me, he wasn’t very impressed with it at all.
We waited ages to pay the check, all the time with a line outside mounting up of people who wanted to get in. They weren’t very organised.
Breakfast options at Gatwick do now seem to be very limited, which doesn’t bode well for future trips from here…
We had a browse of a couple of shops, but there really wasn’t anything we were that interested in, so we settled down to sit and wait for our gate to be called.
Eventually we got up and headed over to the other display near our gate. We were pretty sure that we’d be leaving from gate 51, which is for internal flights, but of course a certain type of law says that if we headed that way, we’d be leaving from somewhere else. Well, we were summonsed to gate 51, and headed off that way.
We were the first in the area, which had four gates, but frankly only enough space for passengers for one flight. I would guess they don’t use more than one gate at one time then?
As we sat there, the area filled up, and we did like the people who rolled up towards the end, and walked straight up to go on to the plane. that’s why we’re all sitting here.
Even better we had our plane deplaning people into our area, which added to the chaos. Mark noticed a line for what he assumed was speedy boarding, so he got in line. When they called speedy boarding, it became apparent that he was in the general line. People had somehow managed to get themselves on the left side, rather than the right side. What is wrong with you people? It’s clearly marked!
Next: can we get off this plane at some point today?
I must say, I'm surprised you didn't stay over the night before with that early departure. I have a 5:45 am flight to Orlando in December, and I'm sooooooooo not looking forward to that early hour.
I must say, I'm surprised you didn't stay over the night before with that early departure. I have a 5:45 am flight to Orlando in December, and I'm sooooooooo not looking forward to that early hour.
Normally we would, but this was a Bank holiday weekend and the traffic on the Friday night was horrendous, which is what I figured. Honestly it would just have been so much stress to go up the night before it wouldn't have been worth it.
Funny that the upper level of parking sounds like it was more convenient for airport entry, but that's where all the open spots were!
Sorry to hear about the minimal breakfast options. And I agree, sushi isn't a breakfast food!