PassPorters playing together at Hallowe’en! THREAD 6 UPDATED 1/22 - Page 8 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Thursday 9 November – part four: an expensive but beautiful visit
But we weren’t done 100%. There was still one more stop I wanted to make and that was to see one of the plantations. I really didn’t make up my mind which one I wanted to see until we were on the way there and then I decided to go with Middleton Place, as my guidebook had given it a three star rating and it had been right with the three star rating it gave Fort Sumter, so on those grounds, we pulled in there.
By then, it was 3.00, so I new we didn’t have much time to see things before we lost the daylight, so we went to get our tickets and hit the hard sell from the guy there. He was nice enough, but still pushed and I’m sorry but $25 each is a lot of money to go in and just see the grounds. He was also trying to persuade us to add in the carriage ride for another $15 and then the house tour on top of that. We debated and decided that there was probably nothing in the house that we hadn’t already seen somewhere in Europe, so we passed on that and the carriage ride, as by the time that finished, we would’ve lost all the light and I wanted to see the gardens.
$50 later, we headed in and took the tour of the gardens, first heading pass the reflecting pool and to an exhibit about slave labour, then we saw some of the animals they have here. I will be honest, I was disappointed that there weren’t sheep out and grazing in front of the house, as I’d seen this image on all the photos.
Our next stop was the stable yard that’s home to craftsmen. In truth, the only craftsman we saw was the carpenter, but he was excellent. There was a school party in there at the time and he was very good at talking to them and giving them a strong message to live with – “if you remember nothing else today, then remember than the slaves who came to this country brought with them many new skills and talents that we were able to use.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
We got talking after the ids left and he was involved in re-enactment battles and plays an Englishman and even showed us his jacket, which was interesting.
We walked past the right hand side of the house and over a bridge, so we could get some better views of the house and the formal butterfly gardens. I was hoping that those would be more spectacular then they were, but having said that, when I looked back at the photos, they seemed more impressive than I remembered them.
We then walked past the front of those butterfly gardens and saw the flooded rice fields. It’s here that you can appreciate the full extent of the land that these people owned. It looked like it went on forever and it was very peaceful. The only thing that did worry me was that the guy at the entrance had told us that crocodiles lived here.
Mark pointed out that the shop was due to close at 4.30, so we only had the briefest of looks at the formal gardens and then went back to the entrance. I got a guidebook, but like everything else here, it wasn’t cheap. The book cost $12.95 and I had paid far less for books about Savannah and Charleston. I guess they’ve got a captive audience here.
That done, we walked back to finish looking around the formal gardens and we also saw the tomb of Henry Middleton, the original owner of this place, along with the remains of the original house. By now, the sun was setting fast, but I did my best with photos.
In their secret garden – and it lives up to its name. You really can’t tell it’s here from outside
The tomb of Henry Middleton….
… presents another silly photo opportunity for my husband!
Thanks for sharing your pictures Cheryl! We chose the Magnolia Plantation tour in which you got to tour the whole property, gardens and swamp and did the house tour along with it. The Fort Sumter tour was my favorite of this trip but the Magnolia Plantation was right up there in the ratings!!!
Thursday 9 November – part five: didn’t you see us?
As we finished our tour, we saw two people just finishing their carriage ride and I knew we had done the right thing in not taking it. I was done with my photos now and had finished seeing the place, whereas had we taken the ride, we would only just be starting the walk around the house.
We got a final few shots on the way back to the car and I love the lighting on these:
Happy, but tied, we set off back to Hilton Head Island. Fortunately, some of the drive home was still in light and we were treated to a pretty neat sunset.
The worst bit of the drive back was actually once we got back to Hilton Head Island. About two or three miles from our resort, a car pulled out in front of us and I guess just didn’t look and see that there were cars coming towards him. Mark saw the situation and just moved out in time, but the guy in front had to do an emergency stop to avoid hitting the guy. It shook both of us up and I was glad that we weren’t too far from home when it happened.
We want back to the room to do some more packing and our usual fretting over whether the suitcase would weigh too much or not. We thought that we would be find with British Airways, as according to their website, their luggage allowance was quite generous, but we knew that Delta was a different story, so we spent ages re-packing and moving things from one case to the other in an attempt to sort things out. Eventually, when we (or should I say Mark! :grin: ) broke the suitcase scales by trying to weigh them in a different way, we knew it was time to give in for the night and head out for dinner.
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Pixie Dust
PassPorter Guide Author
Sorry it was so expensive 
That was an expensive stop! The pictures are beautiful, but I'm not sure it would be worth it! 
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