On the road (3) A (hopefully) sunny September road trip to Spain COMPLETED - Page 6 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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
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.
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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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These gardens just keep going on and on and on.... And it keep getting more and more beautiful! Amazing photos!
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Tanya
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Saturday 4 September – part six: our next stop – or not....
We made our way back through the vegetable gardens, admiring the colour combinations and the way they’d used both flowers and vegetables to great effect in this area.
Some of the history of the site Some of the veg... ... and fruit they grow here
Then it was back towards the entrance, where in the good tradition of Disney, you exit through a souvenir shop and we got the obligatory fridge magnet, along with a book about the various chateaux of the Loire Valley. Ironically, this place seemed to have a better selection of items like that than either Chambord or Chenonceau. Looking through the book, it’s clear there are many more chateaux still to see here, so perhaps a return visit might be in order.
We wandered back to the car, with me grabbing a coconut ice cream on the way out and then we sat in the car for a little while, enjoying a drink, before we set out.
Tim took us a totally different way out of the village and this was much simpler. Why he didn’t bring us this way, I do not know.
Soon we were back on the toll road and heading for Poitiers, which would be our next stop.
This seemed to be a lovely little town, although our plans of visiting it hit the buffers when we got to the place we wanted, but because we failed to select the underground car park, we were forced into going back out of the city. Tim duly told us it would be five kilometres (about three miles) to get back to the square we wanted to be in, so I told Mark not to bother and we headed out.
They sure make vegetables look nice. Excellent angles on your photos!
__________________
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
Saturday 4 September – part seven: I think we need some gas!
We got ourselves on the toll road and stopped at the first rest area we came to. Having driven past literally hundreds of them, it was interesting to finally use one, although literally it did what it said on the tin and was a rest area, with parking, bins and not much else. Still, it was fine for what we wanted and we cleared the windscreen of all the annoying bugs we seemed to have picked up on the journey down so far that the windscreen wipers just weren’t dealing with. Mark also kindly got the laptop out, so that I could work on the trip report on the way down to Bordeaux.
For the next hour or so, that’s what I did, with Mark occasionally spotting cows for me and British number plates. We’d decided to keep a count of how many we saw today and it’s fair to say that neither of us were expecting to see many, going by our previous two trips, but my goodness, there were certainly plenty of British drivers out today. In the end, we spotted 34.
As for cows, the score today was:
5 x Moo
4 x Moos
12 x Mooey
4 x Mooey mooey
No Mooey mooey mooey
Not a bad score for the day, even if I say so myself!
The closer we got to Bordeaux, as Mark commented, the more the countryside started to remind us of the States, although perhaps with one big exception. We finally got to see some of the vineyards that this part of France is of course so famous for, which is something we’d been expecting to see on the whole way down, but instead we’d been treated to views of sunflowers and sweet corn!
Finally – some vineyard sightings! The trees at home have been changing colour since early August and it looks like it’s the same story here as well
The closer we got to Bordeaux, the more another little problem reared its head... The car was starting to get low on diesel. When we’d filled up in Arras this morning, I’d thought that perhaps she could make it all the way to Bordeaux, but we ended up getting a little too close for comfort. It didn’t help that, with all distances given in kilometres and the car telling us how many more miles she had left in her, that took some working out! We eventually gave in and pulled in to fill up at a service station about 10 miles outside of Bordeaux. It just goes to show how much more expensive it is on the toll roads, rather than in city centres, as that cost us €5 more in total, than it had this morning.
Soon we were entering Bordeaux and we went over some impressive bridges as we did so, although it was very hard to get any photos of what we were going over, but this is very much a city built on the water, as each bridge took us over another huge river.
We quickly found our hotel, the Puillman Bordeaux Aquitaine, which seemed to be located in a huge hotel complex, as we were surrounded by other names we knew, such as Mercure and Novotel. We spotted our building quite easily, as it was a huge place.
I don't like that feeling when you let that service station go by, thinking there will be another one just up the road that might be cheaper... and by the time you get to the next one, you are hoping you can just get to the pump!
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Katie's graduation
and it looks like it’s the same story here as well 
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