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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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.
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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
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Moving on with the current of the years.
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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.
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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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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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I recently returned from trip number seven to Disney World where for the first time I rented a scooter for my trip. Here are my thoughts.
Walker Mobility. That is the company I rented the scooter from and they & the scooter were great. I rented the scooter for 14 days with a canopy & damage insurance for $320. I would definitely rent from them again.
The bus drivers were great and usually would move the scooter in to place for me after I drove it on to the bus. Some were more friendly than others but I never had a bad experience with any of them.
The ques weren't as bad to navigate using the scooter as I thought they would be. As long as I went slow, stayed as far to the opposite side of que from the direction I had turn (left side if turning right or vise versa) as possible and did somewhat hard to really hard turns I was good.
If you opt to stay in/on your scooter for the Jungle Cruise & your scooter has a canopy it will need to be removed. This was done very easily and it was also very easy to put back on.
Cirque du Soleil has an area at the top of the theater for handicapped seating. I didn't see this on the website when I bought my ticket, so call if your wanting to go. I thought this was the best view as my direct line of sight was somewhere between the stage and what went on high above the stage which made it very easy to really see everything.
The only negative was that because of all the uneven pavement, lack of any real cushioning in/on the seat & the fact that scooters don't have a suspension the way cars do after two weeks my back was absolutely killing me. Should I rent a scooter again I will definitely a good cushion for the seat.
Thanks for the feedback! Sounds like you're a good driver and I'm really glad you had such a good experience with Walker. That's the company I used before I got my own scooter. You're right about the bumping around on the uneven pavement. It's especially bad at AK, right? I'm used to it, because of the brick sidewalks and cobblestones in Boston, but it does a number on my hips and back if I'm out for a while. A lot of people who own their own scooters have the seats re-upholstered with extra padding.
I'm not sure which park is the worst. Although I think Epcot is the best since other than the bridges scattered around the World Showcase it's wonderfully even pavement for the most part. I can't even begin to imagine the torture that would be using a scooter on brick or cobblestone sidewalks every day. My back hurts in sympathy.
I did forget to mention that with the way people pay absolutely no attention to who or what is around them the huge amount of concentration it took to scoot around the parks without running anyone over had me heading back to the resort with the beginnings of a headache most nights.
Also, I think having used the scooter type carts at stores that have them for months before my trip really helped with my ability to drive the scooter. The scooter I rented from Walker Mobility manouvered much better than any of the ecv shopping carts I used in stores.
My next trip I'm going to try using a walker and have already ordered one so I can test it out and see if it will work for me. The walker idea is thanks to a mother & daughter who were both using a walker that I talked to at the gate when I was headed home. They had been to DW and the walkers let them do DW when they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. The mother had had a complete knee replacement and the daughter had broken her back.
It's true that it takes a lot of concentration to maneuver the scooter in the parks. People just walk sideways, backwards, try to step over you! Others think it makes a day in the parks carefree, just whizzing around, but it's like driving a car. You can't just scoot down Main Street looking from side to side at the storefronts. You need to keep your eyes on the road and have to pull over and stop if you want to look at the decorations. What I wouldn't give for a chance to stroll slowly down Main Street just looking at the castle! It'll be interesting to see how the walker works for you. It will still mean you're standing a lot and I wouldn't think pushing it on the uneven pavement would be too easy.
I agree with Laurie that a walker might not be as good as you think. There's more arm action moving a walker along than you would think, especially if you don't use one ordinarily.
I'm thinking particularly of all the uneven pavement in the MK in terms of bump-bumping a walker along. That could soon get jarring to shoulder joints. And I wouldn't go into the courtyard outside Akershus with a walker if you paid me! (Well, unless it was a LOT of money.) When the CM at Akershus check-in insisted we could not park DH's scooter anywhere but waaaaay over near the wall along the lagoon (too far for him to walk back), I thought that riding the scooter over that decorative pavement was going to knock my teeth out.
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“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” —Winnie-the-Pooh
You can't just scoot down Main Street looking from side to side at the storefronts. You need to keep your eyes on the road and have to pull over and stop if you want to look at the decorations. What I wouldn't give for a chance to stroll slowly down Main Street just looking at the castle!
On my recent trip (first time using a scooter) I found if I put the thing on the absolutely slowest speed I could kind of enjoy the straight-ahead scenery fairly safely most of the time. Still had to watch out for clueless humans, but at that speed the scooter stopped very quickly so unless the CluelessPerson came DIRECTLY in front of me I could stop in time (and quite frankly, if I had been walking, I would have been moving faster and they would have gotten whacked -- I cannot believe how downright clueless and *unsafe* people can be). So castle-admiring is possible... Store-window-looking OTOH ? Yep, have to stop and look; very annoying... Ditto with taking pictures.... Plus the onehanded thing is a little awkward (but not impossible as I discovered on a few stretches of human-free space :-) ).
On my recent trip (first time using a scooter) I found if I put the thing on the absolutely slowest speed I could kind of enjoy the straight-ahead scenery fairly safely most of the time. Still had to watch out for clueless humans, but at that speed the scooter stopped very quickly so unless the CluelessPerson came DIRECTLY in front of me I could stop in time (and quite frankly, if I had been walking, I would have been moving faster and they would have gotten whacked -- I cannot believe how downright clueless and *unsafe* people can be). So castle-admiring is possible... Store-window-looking OTOH ? Yep, have to stop and look; very annoying... Ditto with taking pictures.... Plus the onehanded thing is a little awkward (but not impossible as I discovered on a few stretches of human-free space :-) ).
-SW
I don't know, even just crawling along at my slowest speed I seem to be toddler-dodging all the time at WDW. I'm terrified of hitting someone, even though it's more a case of someone hitting me!
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I don't know, even just crawling along at my slowest speed I seem to be toddler-dodging all the time at WDW. I'm terrified of hitting someone, even though it's more a case of someone hitting me!
I was also terrified of running into someone (I only did once, and it was my sister who was walking in front of me). And yes, in most cases IME it would have been a case of the CluelessHuman running into me, not me running into them; and often them running into me from the SIDE, so it isn't even possible for me to run into them, it was my presence that was the problem.... It was sometimes like some perverted dodgeball game, only the "balls" were CluelessHumans, and they come at you from all directions -- the full 360.
I agree with the invisible and based on my experience I can testify that having a canopy doesn't lift even a corner of the invisibility cloak. I too lived in terror of running in to people although I was much more terrified of running in to child than an adult. A scooter would do a lot more damage to a child than a teenager or an adult and unless they have some serious mental impairments an adult should know to at least attempt to pay some attention to their surroundings. Not throwing stones though since I freely admit to having my moments where my brain just isn't with my body but off galivanting around someplace else without my permission and seemingly without my knowledge.
I agree with the invisible and based on my experience I can testify that having a canopy doesn't lift even a corner of the invisibility cloak. I too lived in terror of running in to people although I was much more terrified of running in to child than an adult. A scooter would do a lot more damage to a child than a teenager or an adult and unless they have some serious mental impairments an adult should know to at least attempt to pay some attention to their surroundings. Not throwing stones though since I freely admit to having my moments where my brain just isn't with my body but off galivanting around someplace else without my permission and seemingly without my knowledge.
Agree completely. I love my scooter and I wouldn't be able to go to WDW (or live my semi-normal life) without it, but it is NOT as nice as walking! I can't tell you how many times I've had people say something like "I'll give you 50 bucks if I can wait in line sitting on that scooter." I always respond, "I'd pay a lot more than that to be able to stand." I don't think the message sinks in, though!
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I can't tell you how many times I've had people say something like "I'll give you 50 bucks if I can wait in line sitting on that scooter." I always respond, "I'd pay a lot more than that to be able to stand." I don't think the message sinks in, though!
That's not as common as invisibility cloak syndrome, but DH has said something like, "Oh, you wouldn't have to pay me a cent. I'd trade in a heartbeat if I could."
People seem to think this sort of remark humorous, but we know much too well it's an issue of "Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait./ You'll be sorry, but your tears'll be too late."
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“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” —Winnie-the-Pooh
Interesting discussion on the invisibility cloak. I tested out my friend Deb's ECV in Disneyland when she stretched her legs. There was an odd difference in how I felt and how people reacted. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was, though.
To give people some credit, I think that they are so accustomed to gauging personal space ranges for walking others that someone seated in an ECV doesn't register on their personal radar, so to speak. I noticed when I briefly needed supermarket ECV's after major surgery that people tend to fix their gaze at about their own eye level and thus simply don't expect someone seated to be moving nearby. Also, we tend to expect that parents will manage their children's behavior so that we needn't monitor where children are relative to our own space who are somewhat shorter than our eye level.
People who've never used an ECV have no idea that the user can't move aside as nimbly as a person walking. When you realize that someone is paying no attention and is about to bump into you, you can usually hop aside easily or stop much more speedily when walking. The bulk of an ECV prohibits rapid sideways movement, and people just don't have any comprehension of how difficult it is to maneuver quickly out of someone's path when you must react and then rely upon the response time of the ECV to stop or move aside...if you even can move aside which may not be possible.
On our recent trip, a woman stepped right into the path of Drew's scooter too abruptly for him to stop from hitting her foot. She screamed at him, fortunately for us in a foreign language as her tone suggested what she said wasn't very polite. Too bad it wasn't English, or I'd have given her a quick lecture on watching where she's walking, because scooters can't move as swiftly as she did.
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“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” —Winnie-the-Pooh
Last edited by Her Dotness; 12-03-2014 at 04:41 PM..
PassPorter's Free-Book to Walt Disney World It’s hard to believe anything is free at Walt Disney World; but there are actually a number of things you can get or do for little to no cost. This e-book documents over 200 free or cheap tips to do before you go and after you arrive. You could save a considerable amount of money following these tips. Perhaps more importantly; you can discover overlooked attractions and little-known details most people whiz by on their way to spend money. Click here to see free sample pages from the e-book! Get this popular e-book free of extra charges when you join the PassPorter's Club for as little as $4.95. A club pass includes access to all our other e-books; e-worksheets; super-size photos; and more! This e-book is also available for separate purchase in the PassPorter Online Store for just $5.95.
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