You can take the girl out of Disney, BUT……… - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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It had been 1 hour and 10 minutes from the time we got in line till we walked out of the show. Like I said, it was neat, but I would never wait that long for it.
I shot one picture as we headed out.
We were still on a mission to get to Jurassic Park. That means you have to go through the WWoHP to get there. And once again, I was clicking away with my camera.
I tried to get some pictures of the windows….not a very easy task with the glare.
Nope, not so good, let’s get closer and see if that works.
No, not at all, but it’s a nice picture of the reflection of the buildings behind me.
And because you can never have enough castle pictures, I took a few more of those as well….except it was crowded and I got Mr. Baseball Caps head in it.
Let’s try this again.
Somewhere along the way we lost Skip. It was very crowded and really hard to stay together. I kept looking back for his green shirt, but I couldn’t see him.
A side not on his green shirt… Skip doesn’t have a lot of nice clothes. He’s a dairy farmer and he wears cruddy clothes everyday pretty much. And then when he does dress up, he tends to wear the same few things over and over. I actually will rotate clothes on his closet rack so he can’t find some things that he wears over and over so we can have some variety. But he still seems to find them. LOL! Last year when we were planning our cruise, and at that point, Skip was planning to come with us; I had been out shopping and scored 3 T-shirts for $1 each on clearance at JC Pennys. I got him a green, a yellow, and a turquoise blue one. I then put them into hiding. T-shirts suffer a not so nice fate at our house. He will put a nice one on for tractor pulling and by the end of the night it has grease and crud all over it. I didn’t want these shirts to suffer the same fate. When he pulled this shirt out that morning to wear, he was clueless. “Hey, where did these t-shirts come from?” LOL! “Oh, I got them last year on clearance and have had them packed away for our next vacation”. LOL!
So back to our Trip Report…..We lost Skip, but we kept going. I beeped him and I think he said he stopped off in the bathroom. So we told him to make his way out of Hogsmeade and we would be waiting there. I decided to take a picture of Claire while we waited. It’s a hard thing to do because EVERYONE there had the same thought and it was crowded.
I even took a picture of another couple while we waited.
And then I took some more pictures.
We spotted this boat. It appears that someone must’ve been cleaning the river, though we never spotted the human doing so.
We walked across the bridge because it was just too busy waiting there and spotted the arch!
And the Jurassic Park music was playing….just to get you in the right mood.
No Claire, don’t go in there, there are dinosaurs that will eat you as a snack! Evidently she didn’t care!
We waited a little longer and soon we spotted a speck of green coming our way.
Daddy’s here!
On to Jurassic Park! Well…..kind of sort of…..
When you enter Jurassic park, you can see Hogwarts from a different angle….and you can never have enough castle shots, right?
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We are now venturing into Jurassic Park. And the first scary thing we see!
The Coke Watering Hole. LOL
We did actually see some dinosaurs on the dinosaur tour though! (if you’ve seen the movie, you might get that line)
Claire was hesitant about standing near this jeep, after all there was a T-Rex popping out behind it…but basically I forced her to do it.
On towards the Discovery Center.
I told Skip we were going in here……Why? What’s in there? Is there a ride?....
I just want to go in…OK?
I have to say this was a bit disappointing to me. I had read it looked very much like the one in the movie…but to me, it had similarities, but not the same.
I told Skip and Claire to stay at the top and I would run down and take their picture. And now that I think about it, I have no clue what was on the top floor. It must’ve not been too interesting if we didn’t browse it.
I must also mention that at this point I was getting hungry. I tend to get grumpy when I am hungry, but my goal was to eat at City Walk somewhere, so I wanted to get Jurassic Park off my list and then we planned to head out and eat…..but in the meantime, I was a little grouchy.
These dinosaurs would’ve met their match if they approached me when I was hungry.
Notice this guys name is Beasaur….I think that is because you would BE sore if you got bit by him.
This area was cute with a couple of dinosaurs set up.
They had these little devices that you could look through and tilt the heads back and forth or up and down. I think only this guys device actually worked. We tried the other two and saw nothing and could barely get the head to move at all.
There was also an area with interactive things to do. Like picking out an egg and then it would do some sort of ultrasound and you could see what type of dinosaur was in there. Sadly this area was crowded and I didn’t have the patience to wait long. We watched one girl do it and the device didn’t work. We watched another person do it and again it wasn’t working properly, so we gave up.
Claire really wanted to play with this stuff and looking back, I really feel bad we didn’t spend much time there. I said we would come back and we never did make it. I rushed us around because of the rumbly in my tumbly. I took a couple more pictures of the area behind the glass where the “Dr.’s” were working.
We then made our way up a hill around the building to get back to the front.
Another Jeep………which Claire again refused to stand by.
Hey look! There’s Hogwarts again.
We moved on and I took a few pictures. We were looking for the River Adventure.
And we found it, but to our disappointment the line was about an hour long. At this point Claire said she would NOT be riding that ride at all. I never did find out if they had a single riders line, but if they had, we probably would’ve done it that way later on. Claire had watched the Youtube video before going and remarked about how fake everything was. But NOW she was telling Skip that this ride has dinosaurs that pop out at you and it’s really scary. LOL. With the line being so long, my hungry tummy, the extremely hot weather, and Claire’s desire NOT to ride it, we skipped it. This is one ride I regret never getting to ride.
And once again, we started walking and taking pictures.
We found the Pteranodon Riders and Camp Jurassic. The Riders had a 50 minute wait…no thanks (and you must have a child with you to be able to ride it as an adult), and I wasn’t about to spend time in a playground…no matter how neat it might be.
Off we go! My mission now is food.
As we entered Toon Lagoon, Skip suggested we just stop and get a quick service something or other. The dino in me roared! “NO! I want something REAL, like nachos, and I want to sit out of the sun!”
He didn’t ask that question again……
We stopped and watched this for a few minutes. Claire loved it.
I thought this area was very colorful as well and I did keep taking pictures, but the sun was really shining hard, so half the time I just clicked and hoped I got something.
Claire was starting to do a little whining herself. She wanted to get wet. We came upon this…..Popeye & Bluto’s Bilge-Rats Barges.
They decided to take the plunge. I declined and went and sat down. As soon as I did, I realized that Skip still had the backsack and it would probably come back soaking wet, along with his phone. Oh Well, I couldn’t see them and I knew they weren’t about to get back out of line.
I took a quick sit down and took a few pictures of the Olive (a water play area).
That got boring quickly, so I went off to take some pictures elsewhere.
This is not my family, but this is the ride they were on.
I took quite a few pictures of this area, but sadly never went into any of the buildings. I would like to explore here a little more in the future as well.
It was like walking right through the Sunday Papers Comic section.
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Great updates and photos! I remember really enjoying the Discovery Centre - and fortunately everything was working in there when we visited. I'm interested to see how soaked they got on that ride, as I know people usually get drenched on it.
Sorry you didn't get to ride Jurassic Park River Adventure! It's a very neat ride, the drop is pretty intense.
I can't wait to see how wet Claire and Skip come out of the Popeye ride.
I'll give you a hint....wet!
Quote:
Originally Posted by chezp
Great updates and photos! I remember really enjoying the Discovery Centre - and fortunately everything was working in there when we visited. I'm interested to see how soaked they got on that ride, as I know people usually get drenched on it.
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Love the theming of the Dr. Seuss area, love the pictures of Claire with Thing 1 and Thing 2, I am sure they loved her outfit. Sorry about the heat and the hunger, hopefully Claire will come off happy (and wet) and then you can go grab something to eat.
Sorry you did not getto ride the Jurassic Park ride. The final drop is awesome. Not sure if it still holds this destinction; but, at one time, it was listed as the tallest and most verticle water ride in the USA. (Over 90 feet and only a few degrees off verticle.)
Love the theming of the Dr. Seuss area, love the pictures of Claire with Thing 1 and Thing 2, I am sure they loved her outfit. Sorry about the heat and the hunger, hopefully Claire will come off happy (and wet) and then you can go grab something to eat.
It was a fun meet and greet. I don't think the characters at Universal see people dress up like that as often.
She was wet, but happiness doesn't always last.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhinohunter
Sorry you did not getto ride the Jurassic Park ride. The final drop is awesome. Not sure if it still holds this destinction; but, at one time, it was listed as the tallest and most verticle water ride in the USA. (Over 90 feet and only a few degrees off verticle.)
I did not know that. I just assumed it was the same size as Splash.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Big Baloo
Great pictures--sure was sunny that day, wasn't it? Good day for getting wet!
It was very sunny. It was a nice time to be in Florida
Splash mountain is 52 feet tall at an angle of 45 degees. Jurassic park is 85 feet tall at an angle (as I was told by an employee) of 87 degrees. I have been able to verify the height but not the degree of the drop. Anyway you look at it is breath taking and you are almost assured to get very wet. Since you did not get to ride, perhaps you would like to take a look. Here is a Youtube POV of the ride. Jurassic Park River Adventure (HD POV) Universal's Islands Of Adventure - Orlando, Florida - YouTube.
While watching that video, I saw this one and thought you might like it as well. Hope the links work.
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