Florida: Day One

Why is it that you can never leave when you plan to? You can have most everything packed and the van loaded and ready to go, you can have a hotel room booked in a city you can reach in reasonable time (seven hours), and you still leave much later than you want to...... Such was the case with our family vacation, something we haven't taken in quite a while. April and I have made some side trips to Florida here and there, mostly for her to do some work and me to have a bit of fun (especially here), but this was the first trip to Florida as a family. My five-year-old daughter Katie is going to DisneyWorld for her first time - it will be my nine-month-old daughter Lillie's first time as well, but she will not remember it.

In a perfect world we would have left our house at 3:00, arrived in Chattanooga, TN around 10:00, eaten a nice dinner somewhere along the way (Cracker Barrel is a favorite roadstop - we have them here in Indy, but I think they are superior in the South), taken an evening dip in the hotel pool, and retired at a somewhat reasonable hour. But families with young and very-young children do not live in a perfect world, and my family is no exception.

We left the house just after 6:00. We had to stop at Andy & Jen's home (Jen watches the girls while April works and I sleep) to drop off Jen's payment - we talked to them about 15 minutes before leaving. We pulled into Steak N Shake to order some greasy burgers and fattening shakes. Just after 7:00, we were finally driving down the highway and on our way.

When we made a pit stop in Louisville (these can be frequent with 5-year-olds), we realized that the sky was growing darker and we still had a long road before hitting Chattanooga. April had reserved a room in a Courtyard Marriott for us, and we'd stay for free by using her Marriott points. Since we didn't really feel like arriving at our hotel at 2:00 AM, April was able to switch to a room in Nashville for us. We would stay at a Courtyard Marriott just down the road from a much grander hotel.

Driving through Kentucky on I-65 is vastly different than driving through Indiana. Hills, hills ... hills everywhere! Katie commented on the plethora of "big walls" alongside the highway. We also noticed a lot of strange "attractions" - the National Corvette Museum, Dinosaur World, and Granny's Quilts to name just a few.

We still hadn't arrived by nearly midnight, so we would be driving to our very first stop on Day 2 of our trip.