When driving, do you stop along the way?

[ANG]

If you drive to Disney and are more than 10 hours away, do you stop at a hotel somewhere along the way or just drive thru?

And please share how many hours it takes you to drive and if you travel with kids.

[Jeri]

Yes we do stop to stay one night along the way.

We travel with kids the 1st time we drove they were 15 months and 7 yrs. We have driven a total of 3 times and will do it again next October.

It is roughly 1600 miles, we leave here about 5 pm on a Friday night, and drive all night and the next day. We stop around 3 or 4 pm and we are usually at Vadosta, GA by then. The next morning we hit the road and are at Disney by 11am or noon.
We do stop and eat and of course potty breaks ( sometimes too often) and when they were smaller we would allow them to run around a bit at rest areas.
Our next trip the kids will be 16, 10, and 2 1/2.

[steamboat willy]

We always drive. We have a 10 hour drive to the front gate of WDW. We always leave early enough, last year at 4:00 a.m., to get to Disney a little after noon. Hope to be driving again in December. Enjoy the ride!

[mommy2maddi]

We will be driving for the first time this year. We live in wisconsin and it's approx. 22 hours. With advice from pp Jeri we will leave around 5 p.m. on Thursday and stop Fri. around 3 p.m. to get to bed early. We plan to be in Disney by noon on Saturday. We will of course stop for breaks. Kids are 5 & 9.

[disneynarula]

For ten hours we usually don't stop. Our kids sleep well in the car and it is easier for us to keep driving rather than checking in and out of a hotel for just a night. We usually don't stop for anything more than 15 hours.

One tip if you do stop... pack a bag for your stopover night with just the essentials. It is much easier than hauling a bunch of suitcases. We pack one suitcase with a change of clothes and toiletries for everyone.

[ANG]

We are 16 hours away. We've driven to the north and back many times with our older son, but this trip is our first with the younger one (18 months) and he hates car rides. BLAH

Driving thru the night is not an option for us. DH and I just can't seem to sleep in the car, taking turns. So we were just going to leave super early 3-4am?

We just hope to be to WDW by dinner time.

I'd rather NOT stay in a hotel halfway but with the kids, I just don't know if it's possible.

[joonyer]

Fortunately, for us its less than a 6 hour drive. We make one stop for gas and do bathrooms at the same time. Its like a Nascar pit stop!

But we often drive 10-12 hours in one day on other trips. Our kids are older now, so that makes it easier. When they were little (and we were younger), we used to do the drive all night while they were sleeping thing. I'm too old for that now. I can stay awake all night easily enough with a little caffeine, but then it takes me two days to recover enough to enjoy my vacation. Now we leave early in the a.m. so we can arrive by supper time on a 12 hour trip.

[barnaby]

We live in southern NJ and are about 17 hours. I've done both, stopped overnight and driven straight through. As a kid we stopped overnight. And my first trip with my kids, we stopped overnight in Savannah, GA.

Our past trip in 2010, we drove straight through from NJ. We left around 3AM and arrived in Orlando around 8PM. We stayed off-site at a cheap hotel about 10 mins from WDW.

I prefer the straight through. I liked getting there, waking up the next day early, checking in and hitting the parks. My kids and wife are road warriors so that helps alot. The drive home is tougher. We leave in the morning after checkout and get home the next day in the early AM.

[Mickey378]

We are south of Boston, and we have drove down 6 times and actually prefer it over flying and renting a car. Without kids we drove straight through in about 21 hours. Now with the kids we get them up at midnight. They'll fall back to sleep tip about 7. We'll get out and change, grab a bite for breakfast and stop every couple of hours for potty breaks. We'll do that til about 5 then grab a hotel for the night usually in south Carolina or Georgia. The next day its an easy drive to Orlando.
Couple of things we do. Definetely pack seperately for the one night stay like someone posted earlier. Put some dark towels in the windows so when you roll the window up it holds the towels in place. This will block out lights from tolls, gas stations, and big trucks, and not wake the kids up. We usually try and find a Hampton Inn to stay for the one night. They are fairly inexpensive and offer a good free breakfast in the AM. Pack snacks, games, and we are going to try letting our boys borrow our kindles.

[TheVBs]

We are about 18 hours away and we definitely stop for the night. We'll leave early one morning, we shoot for 6am, and drive until we get past Atlanta. Then it's up the next morning and we're usually at WDW by early/mid afternoon, depending on how early we get going. We (just speaking for us) don't feel comfortable with the safety risks of trying to drive straight through or drive through the night.

[micky95]

we live only 6 hours away so its not a problem for us.we do go down after my dw gets off work sometimes and stay off property before checking in the next day.as a previous post stated, pack a one night bag.it makes it real easy.I've driven 16 hours straight on some trips but i was a truck driver years ago and love to drive.i'm now the official driver on all trips.

[ibelieveindisneymagic]

We're 22 hours away, so we have to stop ... but any road trip 15 hours or less, we don't bother with the stop, but just get there.

We now take the auto to Disney, but when we drove, we did about 17 hours to Atlanta the first day, and then onto Disney the second.

DD has been a great road-tripper since she was little. We have a rule that she can't use her portable DVD player until after we stop for lunch (makes it something special for the long afternoons), and in the morning she reads, does puzzles, etc.

DH and I have found that listening to books on CD or iPod makes the trip go much, much faster than listening to music.

But, if I was only 10ish hours away, we would drive straight through, with just a few gas and stretch breaks.

[PAYROLL PRINCESS]

We drove from right outside Boston a couple of years ago and went straight through because of time constraints with my job. It took us about 24 hours with just stopping to eat and go potty. We did have one short break on the way down, I think in VA. We were just going to close our eyes for an hour in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. Until the train came by blowing it's horn for about 10 minutes! That blew it for us so we just started driving again. Did the same thing on the way home. But the drive home was much harder because we were exhausted from running around in the parks all week. We pulled over a couple of times to close our eyes but we couldn't really sleep. I wanted to call my BIL and have him have someone drive him to CT to drive us the rest of the way home. That's how tired we were!

I said I'd never drive again, especially not straight through. My nephews were 15 & 20 at the time so that wasn't a problem.

[DonLefNY]

We have a 24 hour drive to our Florida house which is 25 miles south of WDW. In the fall we drive one of our cars down there and leave it there until spring. We stop for two nights, usually around Richmond, Virginia and Savannah, Georgia. We tried it once with only one stop in North Carolina, but that was too much road time in one day.

[Mickey'sGirl]

I wouldn't stop over for a 10 hour drive.

Our drive is about 20-21 hours, and we drive about 2/3 of the way the first day, stay at a hotel with a pool overnight, then travel the last 6 or 7 hours the following day.

We usually drive, and have since our kids were babies.

[Aurora]

Driven down a couple of times and never try it in one shot. We've stayed overnight in Lexington, KY, outside Atlanta, and Greenville, S.C. We have three kids and they have plenty of stuff to do in the car both ways.

We like to stop along the way, not only for eating and stretching but actually doing a little sightseeing, so it works for us. The actual drive time is about 20 hours total.

[wickedgin]

We're about 25 hours away, and we like to drive straight through. We have 3 children, and I feel like they complain *more* when we stop, so I think it's better to just go, go, go!

[cajunmickey]

We are 12 hours from Disney, in South Louisiana. We have done both. We prefer to drive straight through. When the kids were little we would drive all night they would sleep it was great. Now they are older we can all take turns driving.
We did stop on two previous trips. One we didn't get to leave til afternoon so we stopped in Lake City just after you turn on to I 75 from I 10. This was not bad got up early and drove the rest of the way in.

[Belle of the Ball 051411]

It takes us roughly 13-14 hours to get to WDW from Cincinnati (913 miles). Depending on when we leave, determines if we'll stop or not. If we do stop, we usually stay the night in Valdosta, GA.

[buzznwoodysmom]

We always drive. It takes us around 12 hours to get there.

We've done it different ways depending on when we are leaving. There have been times our kids had a half day of school (or we checked them out around noon) and we've driven straight through, arriving between midnight and 1am. There are times we can leave early in the morning, drive straight through and get there in the early evening. And there have been times we've had to wait for the kids to get out of school, or DH to get off of work. In those cases we didn't leave till 3-5pm, and then we'll stop for the night around Lake City, Florida.