Driving from central Illinois

[baz212]

For those of you that have driven from Illinois does this sound reasonable for the trip down. We're leaving from LaSalle-Peru.

Day one leave early, make a stop at Mammoth Cave and go on one of the shorter tours and then continue on to Nashville to spend the night. Mapquest says that the drive will be about 7.5 hours to Nashville. I'm guessing that's without any pit stops.

Day two leave relatively early and drive to Lake City Florida. MapQuest says it will take about 8.5 hours.

Day three leave at about 8 AM and drive to WDW:sohappy: MapQuest says 2.5 hours.

I'll be driving down with my mom and DS5. Mom and I will be trading off the driving.

 

[flydisco]

I love it when topics like this come up on the boards. It is great to see how many people are close to our area and have topics related to something we do each year.
I grew up just outside of St louis and now live a couple minutes south of Srpingfield,IL. I am from a Disney family and in 34 years I have been to Dinsye over 30 times and can only remember flying 2-3 times. I guess with me it is a matter of just getting used to the drive. I hate to fly for one but after learning to deal with the drive for years without the comfort of movie players and video games (I grew up in a time when a cassette tape from my favorite band was the only entertainment we had). We have a DS6 & DS3 that have already made the drive a few times and are pretty good considering the distance. They of course have dual screen dvd players and Nintendo DS games to help them. My wife on the other hand can't stand to be in a car for more than 3 hours!!!
Now after all that useless info my take on the drive. It is about 16 hours for us and the only thing we try to plan around is Nashville and Atlanta rush hour. It is nice to have 70 mph speed limit once you get out of Illinois but Georgia is the worst state for speed traps and construction so beware!! Macon or Valdosta are lengths we have driven when we do not drive straight through that do not leave that bad a second day drive. We will be making the trip back down again in December and are taking some friends which will put 3 Adults and 4 children in a Suburban for the trip

 

[liko]

The last time I did this was in the late 90's with my Mom and brother. We're coming from the far northern suburbs of Chicago, and we drove as far as we could on the first day, and I believe we made it to a suburb of Atlanta. This was just my Mom and I driving. On the 2nd day, we made it to our hotel at Disney in time for dinner. This was perfect because the resorts can be very relaxing after a long drive (nice pools, and decent food for a "fast food" court). I don't know that we could have handled 3 days of driving like you're doing, but of course that's totally up to you. Hope this helps a little.

 

[Dwarful]

We actually live in Shelbyville and I work in Charleston so we are practically neighbors!!:wave:

We were in Shelbyville 2 weekends ago! My youngest daughter won a weekend at Eagle Creek Resort. My husband got home late Friday so we had a later start than anticipated. We had never stayed at ECR before. I missed my turn and we ended up at the prison in Taylorville! lol the girls were asking us "Why are we staying at a place where they put up barbed wire??" We had to make a trip into Shelbyville to get the "Twilight" dvd for our oldest daughter. lol

Now, our first driving trip we only made it to Nashville Illinois! before we had car trouble. You would think that would be an omen...keep us from driving anymore. Not us! It's not really a bad drive. Not sure I'd want to do it over 3 days, but you certainly could, esp. if you took time to see the sights along the way.

 

[Dwarful]

Flydisco, where abouts did you grow up? We live in Godfrey....Let's Go Blues!!!!

 

[sbkline]

:lol:


See Rock City sometime too!

We did that on the same trip that we saw Ruby Falls.