A special birthday, a diamond anniversary and a west coast adventure COMPLETED - Page 54 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Your hand/finger/neck issue sounds painful. Sorry! Hopefully you'll get that MRI soon, so they can start identifying the root of the problem.
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What an awful plane for such a long flight. I'm kind of surprised they use it for 10 hour flights. 2 or 3 hours would be problem enough. At least they did credit you some miles.
Virgin are gradually getting new planes and, in fairness, we've been spoilt, as they've got the new ones on the Orlando route and when we flew out to San Francisco, we were on a newer plane, then our flight to Boston was on the brand new planes that only came into service a few months earlier, so this one was a bit of a culture shock.
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Sorry about all the problems with the flight back home. I certainly wouldn't feel safe after having my seat recline during takeoff! At least Virgin Atlantic rewarded you with 10,000 miles!
My goodness, what a mess of inferior details on the interior of this plan. So glad they comped you with they Flying Club miles. I thought your dinner looked delicious minus all those onions. I love tortellini, but I like my onions in moderation.
The fall after I retired I started having issues with my right hand and wrist and sometimes the whole arm with numbness and tingling and stiffness. Eventually, I had lots of adjustments to my neck and spine. The weird thing is part of mine is carpal tunnel and part arthritis in my neck and a bone spur on my wrist. Hope they get yours figured out.
My goodness, what a mess of inferior details on the interior of this plan. So glad they comped you with they Flying Club miles. I thought your dinner looked delicious minus all those onions. I love tortellini, but I like my onions in moderation.
I'm so with you, as onions tend to overwhelm others flavours in a dish.
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The fall after I retired I started having issues with my right hand and wrist and sometimes the whole arm with numbness and tingling and stiffness. Eventually, I had lots of adjustments to my neck and spine. The weird thing is part of mine is carpal tunnel and part arthritis in my neck and a bone spur on my wrist. Hope they get yours figured out.
Very interesting - I'd read something about mine could be connected to a bone in my neck, as opposed to my wrist. It's good to know I'm not the only one and this seems to be relatively common....
When I woke up, I could easily have gone back to sleep again, but I was determined not to. Given the flight was landing at around 4:40pm UK time, I knew that a few hours later, we’d be going to bed, and I didn’t want to be too awake. I forced myself to stay awake by watching Terminator: Genesys.
Apparently, Mark had managed to watch it on the cruise in the middle of the night. I didn’t know it was even on, and neither did he. He never saw it again. Once again, I really enjoyed this movie, which surprised me. It had some really good one-liners in it, and I liked the way they explained about Arnie’s age in it. I thought it might be a case of them not bothering, and then you spending the whole film cringing about how old he looked, but thankfully not. I also liked the various twists and turns they put in the plot, which I didn’t see coming.
During the film, the lights came back up, and they served breakfast. I got the vegetarian version of Cheddar cheese and spinach hash cake, with sautéed mushrooms and tomato, which was Ok, but the cake was a bit on the dry side.
Mark had the British breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, potato rosti and grilled tomato…
Soon we were seeing land, and this is apparently the coast of Wales…
As you can see, there was quite a lot of cloud around, but I still managed to snag some photos…
I did manage a couple of shots of London as we came into land…
… but annoyingly, the sun was just in the wrong place when I saw the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, so I couldn’t get a shot of them.
We were soon on the ground…
It hadn’t been the greatest flight, with a fair bit of turbulence during the flight. I have to be honest, I was glad it was over and done with. We have been really spoilt with the newer planes on the Orlando route.
We were soon off the plane, and power walked through to immigration, where we were quickly through, although the lines for non-EU passports looked long, as they always do here. We headed down to baggage claim, and were amazed to find all four suitcases off very soon, so we headed outside, and called the valet parking service.
They told us to head over to the short term parking, and they’d meet us where we’d left the car two weeks earlier. They said it would be about 15-20 minutes, but I joked to Mark it would probably take that long to get over there. We weren’t far wrong, as there was a real crush for the elevators to the car park. We picked the right one, in that it turned up first, but then people from the lines for the other ones tried to barge their way in too. I don’t think so!
We literally had no more than a five minute wait before the car was brought back to us. In the meantime, I took some photos of the view from here…
Once we’d loaded the car with our cases – we managed to get all food into the boot (trunk), something we hadn’t been able to do with any of our rental cars in the States - we were on our way out of Heathrow…
We were soon on to the M25, and thankfully, the traffic wasn’t too terrible, although there were queues going the other way.
We were home by 7:00pm, which was great going, considering we’re about an hour’s drive from Heathrow, which meant that it took about an hour to get off the plane, clear immigration, get our luggage and get the car. I just hope it’s that quick when we get back from Boston. In fact, that’s the one thing that kept coming into my head as we left Heathrow – we’d be back here in 12 days’ time…
The weather today was dry, but cloudy with temperatures in the high 60s when we landed. The best thing today was the trouble free drive we had getting home. The worst thing today was going home and all the problems I had with the plane on the way back. Today we tried flying out of LAX with Virgin Atlantic And the result was I’m not sure I’d do it again, based on our experience with this flight. The most magical moment today was flying in over the London skyline.
Smart move trying to stay awake. Hope that helps with the jet lag.
After such a long flight, it sure was nice to be out of the airport so quickly!
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So glad you made it home safely without too much inconvenience. Hope you were able to get a decent night's sleep and get back on your schedule quickly. I also am hoping that you get some answers on your arm and hand problem. Do keep us updated on that, please.
Smart move trying to stay awake. Hope that helps with the jet lag.
The jet lag from this flight was nowhere near as bad as many others from the States, simply because we landed so late in the afternoon, so we didn't have to stay awake long. Normally we're home in the morning and then have to try and battle through the whole day before going to bed.
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After such a long flight, it sure was nice to be out of the airport so quickly!
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I forced myself to stay awake by watching Terminator: Genesys. 
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