Rush Limbaugh, Dramamine and Benjamin Franklin

Before I start this post I need to let everyone know I usually write in a journal documenting everything we do while on vacation. This is our first vacation where I have had a blog so this is taking the place of my journal. I am sorry if I bore you with frivolous details however years from now our kids will be thrilled to have these memories to reflect back upon. The “X” button is in the upper right hand corner of the screen if it gets to be too much. :)

We awoke this morning at 5:00 to begin our vacation! We were all very excited to get on the road except our little (85 lb) Murphy boy, who was very sad watching us pack all our clothing.


He knew something was up, so Greg and I purchased Murph some new toys….. A kong toy to fill with peanut butter, a “busy bone” and a new squeaky stuffed animal that he could destroy. Needless to say he could have cared less as we were driving away this morning.

We left the house at 6:15am (45 minutes behind schedule) to head south. Traffic was a little congested until we were through Cincinnati. Once we were midway through Kentucky Greg said he needed coffee, he felt as if we drove through Cincinnati yesterday. The first few hours were a little slow while everyone woke up. :)



Ben Franklin asked if he could join us on our trip to Florida this year. We like Ben Franklin so we said yes… the more of him the better actually. Vacation and Ben Franklin go very well together.



We stopped at McDonald’s at 8:00 to get coffee and breakfast. Les had hash browns with a cinnamon gooey roll, Nick ordered a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit with hash browns, Greg had coffee, a bacon, egg and cheese bagel with a breakfast burrito, I had eggs and sausage and Ben had a salty biscuit. (sorry, only a few of you will understand “salty biscuit”, I will explain later in another post)


After a couple hours we started heading into the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee. This is where my age started to show. I desperately needed Dramamine. I couldn’t look down, sideways or behind me without feeling like I was going to bring up breakfast. Usually I don’t feel this way unless I am reading or looking down for a long period of time… uggg I am so high maintenance these days.

Thanks to our handy dandy new GPS (Emily) we knew right where the next Wal-Mart was (best purchase we have ever made by the way). We touched the “points of interest” button on the screen and typed in Wal-Mart and it told us where several Wal-Marts were located. We chose the closest one and she took us right to it. It was a brand new Wal-Mart Super Center which was good and bad. Good in that it was clean and fresh. Bad in that it only had one fully finished working restroom and it was in the very back of the store.

I bought my Dramamine AND my sea bracelets…. I looked SUPER cool as you can see. I am such a nerd.

The only station that came through the van clearly was Rush Limbaugh. You can see what he did to the kids. Instead of not mixing politics and religion in a crowd we should add don’t mix politics and kids together in a van. :)

Ben was starting to get on Leslie’s nerves; he wouldn’t stop looking at her. Every time she woke up he would be staring at her and it was starting to get to her.

Our next stop was Gas. We were proud of our van… we drove a good distance with our first tank of gas. This is our first road trip with the new van so we didn’t know what to expect. We took time to run into the Hampton Inn next door to the gas station for a potty break. We were given this great tip from a friend; she and her family stop at Hampton Inn's on their vacations and the restrooms are always clean. Thanks Linda.

I opened one of the compartments in our van and to my surprise look who I found.....


If you missed my post about the Fisher Price farmer (which by the way doesn't even belong to us )click HERE.

We spent time listening to “Greg’s mix”…(cd’s Greg created for our listening pleasure). The rule is once the song comes on you have 40 seconds to make your decision. You can veto the song but there has to be a majority vote for the veto to work. UNLESS you over ride the majority, then you can veto but you lose your over ride power for the next song. I guess you get desperate when there is noting to do in a van for a long period of time. We did get excited to see a sheriff canine unit, but the windows were tinted so we couldn’t see if there was a dog inside. We also saw a hot dog wiener car.... pretty exciting stuff!

We stopped again around 4:00 for linner. We snacked around in the van and was not hungry for lunch earlier. Betcha can’t guess where we ate.

We had a good laugh teasing Nick about kissing Ben. Ben had smooch marks all over his face and Nick was the one sitting closest to him before linner. He didn’t find it funny. :)

Look who we found a friend for during our time at Chick-Fil-a.


We called again to confirm our reservation for our hotel stay in Valdosta,. All was good; they were expecting us. You never can be too careful with hotels. I can’t tell you how many times we have shown up to find 1 king size bed in smoking when I clearly asked for 2 queen beds in NON smoking.

After a few more hours of driving (which felt like an eternity) we arrived in Valdosta and plan to have a wonderful night's sleep. We are a few short hours away from Disney! Tomorrow is Disney Quest!

Good night Y'all.