Our Florida Vacation

We'll be leaving in two days for our family vacation in Florida! Our planning and preparations are in the final stages as we prepare to leave somewhere around noon on Wednesday (April 15). We're traveling with our friends form town, the Hanshaw's, who are "veterans" of this trip, so we'll be following their lead. Maria and Manuela have been working on the schedules for both the trip down as well as our itinerary while in Orlando. We're looking at leaving Simsbury Wednesday at approximately noon, and arriving in Orlando sometime mid-to-late Thursday afternoon. I'm not quite sure of the ETA. I'm just driving the car.

We're getting a rental car as we don't want to put an enormous amount of milage (1,219 miles each way!) on our current vehicles. We'll be picking up the car Wednesday morning, packing it up, and then picking up the boys from school at lunchtime and hitting the road.

The plan is to drive around 11 or 12 hours on Wednesday, with a target of Lumberton, North Carolina for that night's stay. Looking at the map, Lumberton is pretty close to the South Carolina border and it's a little over 700 miles from Simsbury. Wednesday is going to be a very long day. Thursday morning we'll be hitting the road again for another 500 miles or so (around 7 to 8 more hours) until we hit Orlando.

Maria and Manuela have already planned most of our days at Disney. I believe we're scheduled for our first day in the Magic Kingdom for Friday, with Epcot on Saturday. Sunday is a "day off" from the parks. I believe we have another day off either the following Wednesday or Thursday, and then we start the long drive back on Saturday, April 25. Like the trip down, we'll be breaking the trip back into two days. I imagine it will be another 700/500 mile split, which means we'll probably stay somewhere in southern Virginia that Saturday night. We'll have to nail down the details between now and then and make some reservations.

I'll be trying to update this blog with periodic updates (perhaps even from the car via my Blackberry), and also throughout the vacation with some photos and maybe even a couple of brief videos if I feel ambitious enough.

Bon voyage!

Bill