Driving Versus Flying To Disney

They say 'getting there is half the fun' and we have had some great adventures preparing for Disney trips and driving there. We have learned many things along the way.

Before each trip we hold a walk-a-thon for the kids. Every time they walk to the top of a nearby hill and back (around half a mile) they earn a dollar toward souvenirs.

When I look back at some things, they are very funny. Like the time I ate an entire bag of gummy bears, then read the warning on the package "Eating this product may have the same effect as taking laxatives."

Other stories are horrible, like all the birds we have hit with our van over the years and how I have had to pull them out of the grill. We stayed in one hotel that had a mouse running through the ceiling. We moved to another hotel frequented by fishers, and one of our kids got a fish hook in his foot.

Hotels have been an incredible experience. In one hotel, the rooms smelled like moth balls and the hallway smelled like someone used it as a toilet. At another hotel along the way, we returned from dinner and the electronic door key was broken and didn't work. It took an hour for a maintenance man to arrive so we could gain access to our room. At another hotel, we found the bed sheets dirty and, exhausted from driving all day, had to wait for the sheets to be changed.

We always stop at South of The Border and love to read the bill boards leading up to the stop. One year we needed to use the restrooms and they were disgusting - the worse restrooms we have ever seen on the road. And oddly, they had a woman cleaning the men's room. It was very disturbing to as she cleaned the urinal next to the one I was using.

We have met many people over the miles. I met one lady at a Long John Silvers named Moronica (pronounced Moron Ica). We don't have Long John Silvers near us, so, we like to stop at them during our trips. At one, I ordered 24 hush puppies and instead received 24 orders of hush puppies. I was tempted to just accept them but I knew Linda would kill me. Unfortunately, the manager didn't know how to refund a credit card. People are funny: one lady was pushing a luggage cart while talking on a cell phone and ran into an automated door - completely destroying the door (knocking it off the track and sending it crashing to the floor). She glanced at the door and kept going, still talking on the cell phone, and not missing a beat.

We like to extend the vacation with various stops. We usually go to Hershey and Gettysburg. One year we visited a battleship in North Carolina during a thunderstorm. It was a little unnerving to have thousands of thunderbolts exploding all around us while we were inside a metal ship. During a trip at Gettysburg, we were at an ice cream stand that had a game in the front yard: you had to toss a ring on a string and hook it on a tree. My youngest was a bit wild with the game, throwing the ring too hard and clocking people in the head as they passed by.

Sure, we could fly to Disney (and have flown many times). But we would miss all of these great experiences and wouldn't have these incredible memories.