A Swiss spring break with friends TRIP REPORT COMPLETED 6/27 - 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 The software our forums run on is just too out-of-date and it poses a significant security risk.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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Saturday 5 May – part one: what a whizz with a wheelchair!
I don’t think either of us had the greatest night’s sleep. I thought the bed was fine, but Mark was complaining about that. I was bothered more about the noise in the room from someone else, let’s just put it that way. Mind you, he said the same about me, so I guess we were both as bad as each other…
We were up at 5:00am, just as the alarm went off and got going with a nice cup of tea, before we watched the sun literally rise. It was so neat to be up early enough to see it creep above the horizon.
There was still mist handing over the ground in the distance as well…
We headed downstairs to check out, with me paying the £4.20 (about $6) for Mark’s one beer that wasn’t complimentary (we’d already paid for that before Stefano decided everything was complimentary) and then we headed through to breakfast. It was deserted in here…
We’ve stayed here a number of times and never seen it so quiet before. However, there were lots of trays around, so I guess a lot of people had already been up.
We had fun and games getting some juice. There was only pink grapefruit (no thank you – far too tart for me, I like sweetness ), apple (which I’m allergic to) and orange, but the orange was coming out as pretty much water. Apparently it all gets mixed in the machine. Well, that wasn’t working and fair credit to the staff member, she spent ages sorting it out, so we kind of felt obliged to have a glass once it was working…
We filled up and then we made our way into the airport terminal. Again, it was quieter than we’d expected, still busy, don’t get me wrong, but nowhere near as busy as we thought it would be, given it was a Bank Holiday weekend.
We headed up to special assistance, having done a recee last night to work out where it was. There was only one other couple there, much more civilised than Heathrow, which I’d used a couple of times last year, at about this time of the year, almost straight after the freak accident that started off this latest course of events with my ankle.
Within a few minutes, a charming guy was there with my wheelchair and it turned out he’d only been doing this job a month. You wouldn’t have known. He was already a complete whizz with the wheelchair and did a great job of manoeuvring it around. There was a family/assistance security area, which we thought was really good, and even better we discovered that if you had a member of your party with autism, you can get a lanyard and use premium security for almost no wait.
We were quickly through the boarding pass check and then into security. The guy helped get all my stuff into the trays and through security and then pushed me through in the wheelchair through the metal detector, which was very tight, shall we say? I took his advice to keep my arms inside very seriously indeed!
Then the wheelchair got wanded down, which I always find interesting, given presumably it’s airport property? Then my protective boot and tennis shoe (on my left foot) got the same treatment, before I was checked over. It was all very painless and one of the women doing them (I had two) asked about what I’d done, while the other cheerfully chatted to me about how badly she’d broken her arm in a car crash and what her sister had done – fallen off a Wii and broken a bone in her foot so badly, she’d actually shaved some of it off.
Next: “if you have any doubts, now’s the time to say something…”
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He was already a complete whizz with the wheelchair and did a great job of manoeuvring it around. There was a family/assistance security area, which we thought was really good, and even better we discovered that if you had a member of your party with autism, you can get a lanyard and use premium security for almost no wait. 
I took his advice to keep my arms inside very seriously indeed! 
Then my protective boot and tennis shoe (on my left foot) got the same treatment, before I was checked over. It was all very painless and one of the women doing them (I had two) asked about what I’d done, while the other cheerfully chatted to me about how badly she’d broken her arm in a car crash and what her sister had done – fallen off a Wii and broken a bone in her foot so badly, she’d actually shaved some of it off. 
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