Road Trip- To Drive or Fly?
By: Lisa ParsonsJune 15, 2017
Although I'm a planner and I want nothing less than 6 months to establish my family's perfect Disney trip, this year it did not happen that way! My husband and I decided to do a surprise trip with only 45 days to plan. The cost of airfare for our family of four was significant with no availability for what we needed. We also wanted to stay at a deluxe resort. To save money, we decided to make the famous I-75 drive! I live in the Detroit area, so the ride down was approximately 18 hours. The most my kids had been in the car for one trip was 6 hours. It would be interesting!Our kids were completely surprised when we picked them up from school for a dentist appointment but instead had MagicBands in the packed car 
waiting for them! But then the realization set in and my daughter said “Wait, we are driving there?!”The ride down was great. We left around noon on a Friday and made it south of Atlanta at around 1am. Our kids were so excited to be driving through new scenery that they only watched one movie on the DVD players.Things that are useful for the trip:
- Activities - The Dollar Tree has many great items. I purchased cookie sheets and stickers to decorate with and then they had something stable to work on. Also the obvious word finds and crossword puzzles. Bingo and even Go Fish were possible.
- Portable DVD Player - Although we did not use this much on the way down, movies were a hit for my worn out kids on the way home.
- Snacks - Costco carries a great array of multi-packs. I tried to find some items that they have not had in a while. The favorites were bags of popcorn, cashews, protein bars and fruit snacks.
- Cooler - We kept a small one filled with mini-waters and drink boxes.
- Children's Dramamine - Even if your kids are not prone to car sickness, this is an unusually long ride with different terrain including Mountains.
- Small Overnight Bag - We knew that we were going to need a hotel stay on the way down, so I prepared a bag just for this with overnight clothes and kept our bathroom things easily accessible.
- Pillows & Blankets - It's a good idea to test out the backseat sleeping arrangements before leaving.
If you stop at the Visitor Information Rest Areas there are coupon books with special rates for many of the hotels off of the freeway. There are also two websites that you can download the coupons from - www.travelcoupons.com and www.hotelcoupons.com/flash-guide. We chose a random Days Inn. I can't give much of a review because we were only there for about 5 hours. After a quick waffle from the lobby we were back on the road. We arrived at Animal Kingdom Lodge at 2:00pm, just enough time to explore the resort before check-in!
After 5 days at the parks, we decided to take a quick day trip to Daytona Beach. My daughter had never been to the ocean and it is only about an hour and 40 minutes from the Disney area. It was so beautiful that we decided to spend Friday night there, knowing we still had a long drive ahead of us. After some much needed toes in the sand we left Daytona around 9am.One thing to be aware of, if you are on the East side of Florida, your GPS will likely try to take you an alternative way North. Look ahead if you want to make your way back to I-75. Google Maps saved us a little bit of time around Atlanta, giving us an alternative route around all of the “red” areas. Although I love GPS, I still also love the old paper trip-tiks and I have found a great resource to use. “Along 75” by Dave Hunter is an excellent book to follow as you make your drive. Each page that you follow covers 20 minutes and shows everything from speed traps to popular restaurants. This book also introduced us to The Smok'n Pig BBQ! A wonderful stopping point in Georgia that was worth the mile drive from the freeway (Exit 22E).The trip home is indeed a long one, and ideally I would drive there and fly home! I think that this is a trip my family can endure again, given we have at least a week of vacation. The benefit of saving money on airfare allowed us to stay a night overlooking the ocean. A very worthwhile trade-off.A road trip that ends at Walt Disney World Resort is a way to create memories that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives, and I'm glad we chose this last minute vacation! I hope to help plan yours soon.