Famille Du Pentium

Some more tips for multi-day, multi-stop cross-country road trips. 

• Break up your trip into about two hour legs, especially if you have kids.  Don’t forget to include the down time you spend at your rest stops in your daily travel plans.  Allow adequate time for meals.
• For families with kids, stay at hotels that have pools each night.  Your kids are sitting all day – but they have a lot more energy to burn off than you do.  An hour in the pool (and maybe a playground) each evening will get them wound down and ready to go to bed on time
• Save money by staying in hotels that offer a free continental breakfast each morning.  Holiday Inn Express is famous for this.  Hampton Inns also do this.
• Let your kids bring their pillows with them in the car.  This gives them some level of comfort when they take naps in the car
• Know yourself, and allow enough sleep each night to be fully rested.  Driving is a lot more sleep-inducing than your every day schedule, and you will be fighting to stay awake by 7PM if you aren’t well rested
• I like to keep a belly bag in the car with my road stuff in it, like wallet and phone and so forth – rather than in my pockets.  You can put these items into compartments in your car (if you have them) but then you have to keep grabbing them whenever you stop for a meal, get gas, etc.  With a belly bag, you just grab the bag and go
• This depends on you, so "know yourself," but: it’s generally easier to drive in the morning than in the afternoon and evening.  Start earlier if possible, and then wrap up each day earlier rather than starting late and driving into the evening 

As I’ve said before, I’ve taken my share of road trips, with and without family, to destinations that take more than one day to get to.  Planning a multi-day road trips is difficult, because there aren’t many tools that help you do it.  Planning when and where to stop over is difficult with these.

Sure, there are plenty of trip route / mapping services out there, including Google Maps,  Yahoo Maps, and AAA TripTiks.  All of these services (and others) will take a starting address, ending address, and give you a driving route between them.  Most have even added the ability to include intermediate stops in your route – stopovers.  But they don’t give you any help as to when or where you should plan to stop.

To get around this, I start with freetrip.com.  This site gives you basically the same information as other sites, except when you give it a starting and ending location, the route it displays includes elapsed miles, hours, remaining miles, and remaining hours.  <b>None</b> of the other major mapping sites do this, and it’s critical to planning multi-day trips with stopovers.

So you take the route that freetrip.com gives you, and then you start to cut up your trip into legs.  First you need to decide how long you want to drive each day.  Remember that you will need to stop for gas, bio, and meal breaks.  So, depending on how much you stop, eight hours of driving time may end up being twelve hours "on the road" including stops.  So take your actual target driving time per day, and start counting up using the elapsed time on the freetrip.org trip route.  At each daily driving time limit (e.g. every six, eight, or however many hours you want to drive), note from the freetrip.org route what city you are in.  Now you have your stopover cities. 

Next, you’ll need hotels in each stopover city.  Most of the route planning services give you the option of displaying hotels along your route.  But these aren’t terribly helpful to me because (1) you can’t search out amenities at the hotels, and (2) they usually just dump <i>all</i> the hotels along your route, starting from your starting point and ending at your destination.  What I find that works better is, pick a favorite hotel I like based on amenities, reward program, etc. and then  use that hotel chain’s website to locate hotels near the stopover city.  From there, I book the stopover hotel rooms, and get the hotel’s address(es).  

Armed with the hotel addresses, now I go back to Google or Yahoo (not freetrip) and get actual address-to-address driving directions for each day’s leg.  I don’t use freetrip.org for this – I only use freetrip for the rough leg breakdown.  The reason is, in practice I’ve had trouble with freetrip’s actual turn-by-turn directions – inaccuracies, switchbacks, and round-about routes were common.  They work well for roughing out the trip, but for the detailed turn-by-turn directions, I find that Yahoo or Google are better.

So now, you should have directions for each leg of your trip, along with hotels you’re going to say at.   Be sure to read my "Packing Tips" to see how I pack for each stopover in a way that minimizes the luggage you have to carry into and out of your hotel each day. 

So thi s isn’t purely Disney-planning related, because we like taking road trips to other places.  We also went to Disney by road last time, (pre-Blog) and that time in Marla’s Chevy Corsica.  We had a lot fewer kids then :).  I also moved from Seattle to Chicago by car almost twenty years ago, so I have some experience driving cross country.  So these are my road trip packing tips, in case you ever get the itch to hit the open road.

1. Separate your trip into three sections – getting there, being there, and going home.
2. Break up your "getting there" section into legs (e.g. each stopover)
3. Pack one bag for each stopover on the "Getting There" leg.  Include all changes of clothes.
4. Pack  one small  bag for swim gear and accessories
5. Pack kids toys and comfort items in a separate bag (or one for each of them to carry)
6. Pack all of your "being there" clothes into large bags
7. Get one of those car-top luggage carriers; put the large bags into the car-top
8. Put the stopover small bags into the back of the car or trunk
9. Get one of those hitch-receiver platforms
10. Put a cooler with either (A) food for the road or (B) Extra items onto the hitch-receiver platform

Now, at each "Stopover", you just open the back of your car or trunk, grab one bag (plus your swimgear), and go to your hotel room.  The kids carry their comfort items. 

When you get to your destination, you unload the big bags off the roof.  

This plan assumes that you can do laundry (or pay someone to) during your trip.  Wash your "getting there" clothes, and re-pack them for the return trip.

Whether you wash your "being there" clothes or not depends on the length of your trip, and how much you pack.  But of course, at the end of your "destination" trip, you put everything back on top of the car, and have your "getting home" bags in the bag.  

The rear hitch platform is, of course, optional depending on whether or not you need more storage (the cooler keeps things from getting wet) or food on the road.  

More road trip tips to come… 

One month to go.  You already know how much type-a planning I’ve put into this, but to give you an idea of what a truly type-a personality I am (and you really must be to go to Disneyworld), here’s what’s left:

1. I have to pull the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World apart, almost all 800 pages.  Touring plans, pocket guides, parade viewing spots, fireworks viewing spots, and all manner of tips and tricks will be laminated into folding pocket guides
2. Check  Orlando weather .  June is tricky in Orlando.  We have to know what to pack 🙂
3. Reconfirm all resorts and hotel accomodations
4. Shopping for clothes and shoes that we will need
5. Reconfirm drive routes – especially for getting out of Chicago, since both the Dan Ryan and the Tri-State will be under construction when we leave.  We’ll have to take Lake Shore Drive through whatever detour route to the Chicago Skyway they have set up, probably through Blue Island.
6. Charge the iPods
7. Hold mail
8. Packing
9. Haircuts
10. Take out garbage
11. Set thermostat
12. On road by 6:30 AM on our departure day

The good news is that Marla’s aunt and uncle, who live in South Florida, are coming up to Orlando to celebrate Mike and Aaron’s birthday at the character dinner at Liberty Tree Tavern.  Nobody has RSVP’d that they’re coming to Ethan’s birthday party in Savannah, GA.  🙁  I guess nobody likes Chuck E Cheese.

This is the time of year where we haven’t had any holidays, vacations, or other family events to use as an excuse to take pictures of the kids.  So just ’cause it’s spring, here are some pics we took this week.  (Actually, this was a birthday party for our next door neighbors at the Skokie Exploratorium).

See The Latest Pics HERE 

I was spelunking through the site logs recently and noticed that a lot of people are using the search function to try to find the French version of this site.  I understand their frustration, what with "Famille" being a French word and all, I guess somehow it follows that the entire site should either be in French, or at least have a French translation.  So, to make sure that this post comes up whenever they search, I am putting the following search terms in to ensure that their search efforts get a hit:

en francais

french site

There.  Now that you’re here, here is a message that Google Translator told me to give you:

Earlier I described the road trip we’ll be taking to Disney later this year.  Our return trip is not quite as interesting, we stay an extra day in Orlando this year so we need to make a direct and quick run home, but the trip still deserves some color.   So open the map in a separate window and follow along.

Keeping with my previously explained practice of treating Orlando as one of our "stopovers", we’ll actually be traveling 11.3 miles / 24 minutes from our Disney Resort to our first stopover, the Royal Pacific Resort near Universal Orlando.   We actually will spend one day at Univeral Orlando park, then that evening we will go watch Blue Man Group (Sssh! It’s a surprise for Aaron…) and then get some sleep.

Starting fresh and early on Friday morning, we first head west on I-4, then north on I-75 to Atlanta, Georgia where we once again stay at a Holiday Inn Express (Hey, what can I say – points, pools, jacuzzis, and free breakfast.)

The next day we continue north on I-75 to about Chattanooga, where we turn northwest on I-24 toward Nashville, and then it’s back on I-65 northbound, where we’ll stay until we complete most of our journey.  We want to make tracks on our trip, so rather than stopping over in Louisville, we’ll keep going north on our second day until we reach Scottsville, IN, where we stay at our last Holiday Inn Express. 

Then we make the four hour trip back to Chicago via I-65 to I-90/94/80 where we’ll be staying overnight at Chez Humphries-Dolnick’s, and going back to work :(.

Some people think I’m crazy.  I like taking family road trips.  We’ve conditioned our kids from an early age to be fairly good road trip-ers.  This started as they were barely weeks old, and we would load them up in the car and take them to Lake Camelot in Wisconsin, four hours (at 80 MPH) from our house.  So, they like road trips too. 

Getting there is, indeed, half the fun.  So I’m going to share some of that fun with you now.  Here is a Google map of our entire outbound trip – you can open this in a separate window and play along as I narrate.  You might have to use the Google "grabber hand" to reposition the map so that the entire trip is visible.

First, there’s the route.  Outbound, we’re going due south until we hit Louisville, Kentucky.  On our last trip, that was our first stopover.  But that was barely 5 hours into our first day, and we had hit the road at 6AM, so we actually got the hotel about 2 or 3 PM.  Too early.  So this time, we’re still hitting the road early (6:30 AM) but stopping later.  Anyway, at Louisville, we turn east for a while, then south again toward Knoxville.  But the first day, we stop short of Knoxville, in London Kentucky.  We stay overnight at a Holiday Inn Express in London.

Day two, we continue south to Knoxville and then head somewhat southeast toward the Atlantic coast.  We go through North Carolina and South Carolina and then turn south toward Savannah, Georgia… where we stay overnight for the second night (again, a Holiday Inn Express). 

Day three is a real easy one.  Day one and two were eight hour drives (according to Google), now we’re driving about 4.5 hours from Savannah to Orlando, strait down I-95 and the Atlantic coast until we hit Daytona Beach, then I-4 back inland to Orlando.

We always treat our destination as a "stopover" – I.e. we get there one day earlier and get settled.  So we are actually staying in a different hotel on Day three PM than our Disney resort.  This time, we decided to try out the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando.   This looks like a lot of fun for the kids, albeit expensive.  Hey, it’s also a Holiday Inn, I get Priority Club points for it!

Finally after Nick Hotel, we make our way across town (if you use the zoom tool in Google maps, you can see our last leg) from Orlando to Lake Buena Vista, the official city name (well, one of them) for Disney World.  We’re staying at the Port Orleans Riverside resort, near Downtown Disney.

I’ll cover the road trip home in a separate entry.

I won’t go into the whole Passover story, like I did for Purim.  However, I thought this was an interesting side note.

Most of us know the story about the Jews escaping from hard labor in Egypt.  Not enough time to rise the bread, so we eat Matzah, yadda yadda, and then the parting of the Red Sea.

What few know is that actually, it didn’t go like things did in The Ten Commandments.  The Jews didn’t arrive at the banks of the Red Sea and suddenly things just opened up for them.  In fact, at first, (the story tells us), nothing at all happened.  It wasn’t until every Jew had completely immersed themselves before the miracle of the parting of the Sea occurred.  In fact, the story goes on to say that most had to go in far enough that they actually could not breathe until the sea was parted.

This was an extraordinary leap of faith.  No one knew for sure what to do next or what would happen, only that their God would see them through.  And only when things got as bad as they possibly could get (as with the faithful who dove in over their heads) did divine intervention save them.  

This story tells us a lot.  First, that faith – most importantly – is required for God’s intervention.  Second, even when God was imposing his will in the form of miracles that saved the Nation of Israel, personal human choice was required to make those miracles happen.  Faith first, and choice second.  That’s the way it has always been, even in the days of the Passover.

Happy Passover. 

For those of you who feel that Guiliani, McCain, and even Romney aren’t far enough to the right for your taste, you now have the heir apparent to the extreme right void left by these candidates – Tommy Thompson.

I like Tommy.  He was a four-term Wisconsin governmor during the years that I was vacationing up there.  He did a pretty good job.  And he’s very, very clear about what his candidacy is about: “I am the reliable conservative, my record shows that,” he said. “All that people have to do is look at my record, and I am one individual that they can count on.”

I wish I could rely on Conservatives practicing the Conservative values of the likes of people such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.  Unfortunately, today a “Reliable conservative” means someone who will kow-tow to the religious right, and we don’t need more Jerry Falwell clones in office.