Is this crazy, or has anyone...

BecBennett

Statistically, 6 out of 7 dwarves are not happy.
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Driven from Connecticut down to WDW?

We're an Australian family and every time we head over to the US we visit family in CT and spend time at one of the Disney parks (if we have less than a week we do DLR, if we have more than a week we do WDW). However my husband is pushing for us to do something different, which is understandable, but we have to visit family while over there, and damned if we're not going to visit a Disney park when given the chance.

So it just popped in to my head, why don't we hire a winnebago or similar and take a few days to drive down?

We have driven around New Zealand in a campervan before and didn't want to kill each other at the end of it, and we have driven in the US just fine (albeit not a campervan) but I'm not entirely sure if this is a trip worth doing.

So if you've done it before, is this a trip worth doing? What do you recommend seeing along the way? Where would you stop for the nights? Or is it more of a boring highways drive that you try and get over and done with as quickly as possible? Any alternative suggestions ?
 
A few years ago I went online to check prices to rent an RV for a week, and found that it was pretty expensive so we chose not to do it - so if you start searching online you may answer that question.

But if you did choose to rent one, I think I-95 from CT down to FL is probably one of the worst drives in the country, especially through the Northeast. Once you get south of VA it's mostly fine but it's a lot of traffic to deal with for a lot of miles.

How many in your traveling party?
 
I think it would be fun but we have always been that family that while driving see a sign and just stop at random places. A joke in our family is the fact that we get lost a lot, it started with my father (who was actually a navigator on the planes that took off air craft carriers during WWII) and has carried on to all us kids and our kids. So when we get lost we find the best stuff and always say "I always wanted to know what was down that road". I think if you have the time to take at least a week to drive down and only drive for about 4 or 5 hours a day so you would have time to stop and explore the area you are in, it would be fun. I would get a couple of hidden gems books from areas you think you might stop at and go from there. We are actually in the process of looking at RVs to buy for just that purpose.
 


You should find a lot of threads here on the Transportation Board about people who have driven from the northeast to WDW. Once way to avoid traffic, especially NYC, would be to do the I-81, I-77, I-26 route to I-95. Depending on where you are in CT you have at least a couple options on how to get to I-81. You could take I-84 to I-81, or the Tappan Zee Bridge (I-287) and then take either I-80 or I-78 to I-81. That would help you avoid the worse of the I-95 corridor between NYC and DC/Virginia.

My FIL did that route by himself last summer coming from just north of Boston and said it was a piece of cake. He took two day to drive it.
 
We live in CT and made the drive down to WDW three times. If we had more time to vacation, we would not hesitate to do it again - especially since our two kids are now driving age and can pitch in with the driving. At the risk of repeating some of the sentiments already expressed by previous posters, I'll share some of the tips and lessons learned from these drives:

-We avoid Interstate 95 in the Northeast like the plague. It is a great drive once you get south of Virginia, but anywhere between CT and Washington D.C. is awful. Especially avoid going over the George Washington Bridge. We typically use an alternative route that takes us on Interstate 84W through NY and PA, then onto Interstate 81 in PA, then you head down in a southeasterly direction toward Virginia. There are a few different routes that will take you on this path. When you look at this on the map, it appears you are going very far West to go South, but believe me the time you save in NOT being stuck in traffic (and also the toll savings) is well worth it. Here is a route that I found on Mapquest that has the general idea:
https://www.mapquest.com/directions/list/2/us/ct/west-hartford/to/us/fl/orlando

-We typically stretched the drive over 2-3 days and stayed overnight either with family along the way, or stayed in a moderately priced hotel like Hampton Inn or Country Inn and Suites. These are great because they are usually very well maintained and breakfast is included in the price of the room. I scour the travel sites for deals on these hotels and have been able to get some very affordable rates.

-Bring plenty of stuff to keep your kids occupied, like movies they can watch or games they can play in the car. When our kids were younger, each one had an activity center type of thing that hung down from the front seats and folded down to make a "desk" surface that they could use to write, color or play with their toys. We also used a portable DVD player and brought along plenty of Disney movies to get them in the spirit (like they really needed any help for that!).

-Pack some snacks that are easy to eat - ones that kids can on their own and don't get too messy. Pack plenty of water and other beverages in a cooler so you are not stuck paying crazy inflated prices for drinks at the rest stops.

-Speaking of rest stops, give yourself plenty of time to make stops...although UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU WAKE UP KIDS WHEN THEY ARE SLEEPING to make a rest stop. Hoo boy did we learn that the hard way! The major highways have plenty of rest stop options - we have found that Love's Travel Stops and Petro Stopping Centers are clean, reliable and convenient. Chick-fil-A restaurants are also very clean and their service is exceptionally friendly. The state-run highway rest stops in Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina are fantastic and I am actually jealous of them. Any CT residents on this board know exactly what I am talking about.

-If time is of the essence, avoid getting bogged down at a restaurant to eat a meal, unless that is something that you really want to do. We typically would just grab a quick lunch at McDonald's or Chick-fil-A (or eat a picnic lunch of what we packed for ourselves) and then get back on the road as soon as possible. We kept the nice, comfortable sit-down meal for when we would reach our driving destination for that day.

-Another rest stop tip: Try to find a place that has some kind of playground or other open recreational space for your kids to run around and get their ya-yas out. Some of the state rest stops do have playscapes, but also some restaurants like McDonald's and Chick-fil-A have them.

-You may not need to rent an RV for this trip. They are expensive to rent and you will pay a ton for gas. We made this drive in a Honda CR-V and it certainly did the trick for us. As I mentioned above, if you search the travel and hotel sites, you can find perfectly good and clean accommodations for a price that I am sure would be less than the daily cost of an RV. In addition to the ones I mentioned above. we have had good luck with Microtel, Holiday Inn Express and Hyatt Place. Just be sure to check the reviews because of course individual properties can be better than others.

-We used this guide book the first time we drove down and found it very helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-I-95-History-Trivia-Interstate/dp/1894979974

-We would limit the amount of driving done in a day to about 8 hours tops, with each driver taking 2 hour shifts.

-I am a history geek, so we used this as an opportunity to visit some historical sites like Civil War battlefields, and there are plenty of places of interest along the way if you are into that sort of thing.

-If you are driving on I-95, you will see lots of billboard advertising for South of the Border. This is a tourist trap, but it has become somewhat of an institution I guess. We have never gone there, but we do find the billboards to be rather amusing. They usually have some corny joke starting with "Pedro says..." We play a game that the first one in the car to spot a South of the Border billboard wins.

Good luck and enjoy the ride!
 
But be sure to check the cost of the RV rental vs airfare. Depending where in CT you are you could have the option of a number of airports such as TF Green in Providence, Bradley near Hartford, Newburg- Westchester- JFK, or Laguardia in NY. I second what the PP said about not needing an RV to do the drive, unless of course that's part of the lure for you.
 


......But if you did choose to rent one, I think I-95 from CT down to FL is probably one of the worst drives in the country, especially through the Northeast. Once you get south of VA it's mostly fine but it's a lot of traffic to deal with for a lot of miles....

Very true but if you hit the Baltimore/DC area at non rush hours then it's still the quickest. Many people take I-81 down through PA/MD/VA to get around DC.
 
-We avoid Interstate 95 in the Northeast like the plague. It is a great drive once you get south of Virginia, but anywhere between CT and Washington D.C. is awful. Especially avoid going over the George Washington Bridge. We typically use an alternative route that takes us on Interstate 84W through NY and PA, then onto Interstate 81 in PA, then you head down in a southeasterly direction toward Virginia. There are a few different routes that will take you on this path. When you look at this on the map, it appears you are going very far West to go South, but believe me the time you save in NOT being stuck in traffic (and also the toll savings) is well worth it. Here is a route that I found on Mapquest that has the general idea:
https://www.mapquest.com/directions/list/2/us/ct/west-hartford/to/us/fl/orlando


Exactly. The inland route "looks" like it's way out of the way. However it's only about an hour longer with all things even. Throw in a little traffic on I-95 and it can easily make that hour up and then some making the inland route faster.

Similar example happened to me this spring heading back to Boston from Myrtle Beach. Friends left at 9am and drove the I-95 route. We left at 930a driving up a coastal route (US 17) to visit a friend of the family on the way in North Carolina. We stopped to see her for 2 1/2 hours for a long lunch. It basically gave our friends a 3 hour head start. It took them 16.5 hours to make the drive due to the traffic they hit around DC. We continued up 17 and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel and got on I-95 just before New Jersey. In the end it only took us 15.5 hours, an hour quicker them them.
 
I don’t get it. Why would you voluntarily spend so much of your vacation sitting in a motor vehicle?

If you want to do something different, why don’t you do it near a Disney park (unless you already have). Fly into Tampa and go to Busch Gardens. Fly into Burbank and do the WB studio tour, then Uber to Disneyland. Go to the Universal park in Orlando or California. Or sea world in orlando.
 
As others have said, RV rentals are pretty expensive. (think $100-200/day) Plus gas for them and RV camp site fees. If you have money to blow, then you could make a trip of it if you wanted to do camping type trip, taking a few extra days to travel. But otherwise, if want to drive, getting a regular rental car and hotels would be cheaper. Even flying would be cheaper.

Yes, roads and traffic are not the funnest in the North East.. Know my parents had taken their RV up to CT back in the day, but I wouldn't want to drive a large vehicle like that on some of the back roads or traffic on the major ones.

Driving through the country side and mountains of VA looks nice, but can make for a boring drive.. even more so on I-81/84/78 through PA as they are major truck routes but nothing much to see.
 
-If you are driving on I-95, you will see lots of billboard advertising for South of the Border. This is a tourist trap, but it has become somewhat of an institution I guess. We have never gone there, but we do find the billboards to be rather amusing. They usually have some corny joke starting with "Pedro says..." We play a game that the first one in the car to spot a South of the Border billboard wins.

South of the Border used to actually be a fun place to stop back in the day (70's/80's) and there were many more billboards. Seeing the billboards now is a nostalgia thing, but the place itself has deteriorated in to a seedy dive tourist trap. Stopped to get gas there a few times, but not much to really keep your interest.
 
Driven from Connecticut down to WDW?

We're an Australian family and every time we head over to the US we visit family in CT and spend time at one of the Disney parks (if we have less than a week we do DLR, if we have more than a week we do WDW). However my husband is pushing for us to do something different, which is understandable, but we have to visit family while over there, and damned if we're not going to visit a Disney park when given the chance.

So it just popped in to my head, why don't we hire a winnebago or similar and take a few days to drive down?

We have driven around New Zealand in a campervan before and didn't want to kill each other at the end of it, and we have driven in the US just fine (albeit not a campervan) but I'm not entirely sure if this is a trip worth doing.

So if you've done it before, is this a trip worth doing? What do you recommend seeing along the way? Where would you stop for the nights? Or is it more of a boring highways drive that you try and get over and done with as quickly as possible? Any alternative suggestions ?
I agree with the others here, an RV rental would be really expensive (and personally, a nice air conditioned hotel room with a comfy bed each night is my preference)
May I suggest another alternative, book your flights as an "open jaw" or 2 one-ways. By this I mean fly in from Australia to CT then make the return flight from Orlando (or somewhere in Florida). This will save you having to back track all the way to CT at the end of the vacation.
Then book a one way car/SUV rental between the CT and the Florida airport (MCO = Orlando).
Pick out your points of interest along the route.
Book a night or two hotels based on your POI's
Last few days spent at WDW and then fly home from MCO.

We frequently plan this kind of trip as we like the "roadtrip" part of the vacation, but hate having to backtrack at the end of the vacation (the end of the vacation is depressing enough without having drive a bunch to take a flight back home).
This Feb, we flew into Miami, went on a cruise, picked up a rental car at MIA and drove up to Orlando for the "Parks" and flew home from Orlando.
Last year we flew into New Orleans, spent a few days in the area, then drove the rental car to Orlando (with a stopover in Panama city). Spent 10 days enjoying WDW, USO, Daytona Beach etc then flew home from Orlando
 
South of the Border used to actually be a fun place to stop back in the day (70's/80's) and there were many more billboards. Seeing the billboards now is a nostalgia thing, but the place itself has deteriorated in to a seedy dive tourist trap. Stopped to get gas there a few times, but not much to really keep your interest.

I even noticed the last time that we drove down it seemed that there were fewer billboards than when we first started making that trip.
 
When I rode in a car as a kid in the 70s we counted the signs on the way down and counted up to 110 by the time we got there. On our drives in 2016 and 2017 we also counted and each time counted only 29 on the way down, so yes definitely fewer than the old days...
 
I even noticed the last time that we drove down it seemed that there were fewer billboards than when we first started making that trip.

When I rode in a car as a kid in the 70s we counted the signs on the way down and counted up to 110 by the time we got there. On our drives in 2016 and 2017 we also counted and each time counted only 29 on the way down, so yes definitely fewer than the old days...

We did the drive from Boston to Myrtle Beach in April and did not see many billboards. I don't even think we saw one in VA and of we did it wasn't until way after Richmond, I don't think they start until NC now going south. I read at one time the first billboard going south used to be near Philly but that one has been gone for years, and then you would see them from VA the rest of the way down.
 
Drove down from CT to WDW last December after having done it as a passenger in my parents' van many times as a child, and it was perfectly fine. It's not the most exciting drive, but it can be done pretty easily in two days -- or even one day if you split it up with multiple drivers. I was looking to make the best time possible, so I couldn't really recommend any places to visit, but as far as planning splitting up the trip, I'd recommend trying to get at least past Richmond, VA on your first day, so you avoid the major traffic points when you hit the road the next day (though rush hour traffic in South Carolina as you head into Georgia can be pretty bad too).

And yes, avoid South of the Border at all costs. We used to stop there as a family when I was a kid for novelty reasons, but now it's even more of a run-down tourist trap than it ever was.
 
But if you did choose to rent one, I think I-95 from CT down to FL is probably one of the worst drives in the country, especially through the Northeast. Once you get south of VA it's mostly fine but it's a lot of traffic to deal with for a lot of miles.

This!
 

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