Sailing, running... and sweltering in the heat in London! COMPLETED 8/23 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Nice tour of Apsley house. I especially enjoyed the photos of the Drawing and Waterloo rooms as so beautiful. Too bad no photos were allowed inside. Must have been tough to deal with the oppressive heat inside!
It was horrendous... I just kept wishing we could find air conditioning!
Saturday 14 July – part nine: enjoying the views from the Wellington Arch
We came out of Apsley House and made our way over to the centre of Hyde Park Corner. Imagine the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, except imagine a park around the arch, with the traffic still circling around it and you get the idea…
We headed over to the Royal Artillery Museum first, which is dedicated to casualties from the Royal Regiment of Artillery during World War I. It features four figures of artillerymen positioned around the outside of the memorial.
Next door was the Australian War Memorial, which was only dedicated in 2003 to the 102,000 Australian dead of the First and Second World Wars. Yes, that is a huge number, but honestly? It didn’t surprise me, given we’ve seen graves of Australians whenever we’ve visited the battlefields of World War I in northern France. It’s made up of a semi-circle wall of grey-green granite slabs from Western Australia. The wall has the names of the towns in which all the Australian soldiers were born in. The total is more than 23,000. Some of the town names are picked out in a bolder type, which then creates the names of 47 battles in which Australia was involved in. It’s one of the most clever memorials I’ve seen.
Now, in the last shot, you can see our next destination – the Wellington Arch. It was originally located nearby and dates from 1830, but it was transferred to its current site in the 1880s. It once supported a statue of the 1st Duke of Wellington on top of it, but a four-horse chariot was mounted on it in 1912. The Arch was commissioned by King George IV to commemorate Britain’s victories in the Napoleonic Wars.
Now I knew that this was owned by English Heritage, but I always assumed that you had to walk up here. No, they have an elevator here! That was it, sold! The guy here was so much nicer and friendlier than the horrible woman at Apsley House, even when he saw our “sort of member card”. He just smiled and sent us on our way. Now why couldn’t she have been like that? For goodness sake, it doesn’t take that much to be nice…
Once we got to the top, there was a display about the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo. I didn’t realise it, but the army that took on Napoleon was made up of a variety of different nationalities, as Britain was disarming at the time Napoleon returned to Europe.
However, what I really came up here for were the views…
Apsley House is behind the trees
The Royal Artillery Memorial is in front of the big white building…
… and a close-up of it
The Australian War Memorial is at the bottom right of the shot
The equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington
This is the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, also known as the Boy David, a memorial to casualties during the First World War
Looking down Constitution Hill
The Commonwealth Memorial Gates
The London Eye with the Shard behind
The greenery is part of the gardens of Buckingham Palace
With that, we headed back to ground level. I’m glad we came here, as it was a neat perspective of London, but in truth, you couldn’t see as much as I thought you’d be able to. At least we can come back free of charge whenever we like.
I'm putting this whole area on our list. The Australian memorial is very well done indeed. Very unique.
From up on top of the arch, you can see how desparately dry the grass is. Another 2 weeks of no rain and ours will look the same!
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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
I'm putting this whole area on our list. The Australian memorial is very well done indeed. Very unique.
It is a beautiful part of London.
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From up on top of the arch, you can see how desparately dry the grass is. Another 2 weeks of no rain and ours will look the same!
Yes, that was probably things at their worst. About two weeks later, we finally got rain again and have had quite a bit since. Thankfully the grass is starting to recover a bit....
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Some great views of London several floors up but as you said they could have been better. Those are some very good war and military memorials as done quite well, even not very extensive as quite focused! Looks like these were well worth doing.
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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!
Some great views of London several floors up but as you said they could have been better. Those are some very good war and military memorials as done quite well, even not very extensive as quite focused! Looks like these were well worth doing.
I was glad we took the time to visit this part of London....
Saturday 14 July – part ten: worth the price of the ticket alone!
We made our way from Wellington Arch and started to walk towards Buckingham Palace.
On the way, we found the Commonwealth Memorial Gates, which were inaugurated by the Queen in 2002. They’re another war memorial commemorating the armed forces of the British Empire from five regions of the Indian subcontinent – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka – as well as Africa and the Caribbean, who all served for Britain in World War I and II.
After about a 10 minute walk, we were at Buckingham Palace:
The top of the Queen Victoria Memorial
These are the Canada Gates:
We carried on walking and, after about another 10 minutes or so, we got to St. James’ Park tube station. My goodness, we needed a sit down when we got there, as we’d been on our feet a long time!
We grabbed the Tube and headed over to Tower Hill, which is right by this place… the Tower of London:
However, we weren’t here to see that. Instead, we made our way over to Tower Pier. When we got there, we couldn’t believe the length of the line of people queuing to get on a boat!
Thankfully, when we asked someone, we were able to just walk past them all, as we were already booked on the afternoon tea cruise. As I said to Mark, just being able to do that was worth the price of the ticket alone!
We had about 10 minutes before the boat was due and thankfully there were seats there to wait. While we were there, we noticed there was a ship by HMS Belfast, but not the type that was there a couple of weeks ago, for those who read that trip report. This was one was a Belgian frigate. They had a Belgian and British flag on the deck – why? Well, today England were playing Belgium in the third place playoff at the World Cup in Russia. Sadly, Belgium won, but more of that a little later…
Soon our boat was pulling up for our afternoon tea….
It ended up that we were the second in line, purely by luck, which worked out really nicely. They got each group to board one by one, as they needed to seat you at your table. We knew we’d be by a window, having paid extra to get one, so we had an idea of roughly where we’d be heading. I’d also declared my allergies and had put down that I didn’t eat meat, but I did eat fish, as every time we go for afternoon tea, I get annoyed when I’m asked if I’m veggie, because when I say I miss out on a prawn sandwich and they just happen to be my favourite.
It turned out we were seated right by the kitchen/bar area and at the back were the restrooms. As we were amongst the first on board, I was able to take advantage of those before things got too busy.
I didn't realize they were called the Canada gates at Buckingham Palace. (off to google now what that means.... ) Cool!
Really really looking forward to this afternoon tea cruise as it kills two birds with one stone! It's on the top of my potential list of things to do, so I hope you enjoyed it!
__________________
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
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I didn't realize they were called the Canada gates at Buckingham Palace. (off to google now what that means.... ) Cool!
Really really looking forward to this afternoon tea cruise as it kills two birds with one stone! It's on the top of my potential list of things to do, so I hope you enjoyed it!
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Must have been tough to deal with the oppressive heat inside!
Some of the town names are picked out in a bolder type, which then creates the names of 47 battles in which Australia was involved in. It’s one of the most clever memorials I’ve seen. 
That was it, sold! 
Looks like these were well worth doing. 
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