Day one. Thursday, March 20

It was uneventful but sometimes stressful.  Wendy spent the morning doing the final packing while I had to work.  At around 11:00 we made sure the house was in order and started to pack the van.  Surprisingly everything fit quite nicely this time due to some pre planning which included the use of vacuum bags for some of our summer clothes which allowed us to pack much more into a single suit case.  There were no weight limits since we were not flying.  We picked the kids up early from school and were on the road by 1:00pm.

We drove south via route 33.  This was only 1 day after the torrential rain fall which melted our 20+ inches of snow and caused flooding over much of the state.  South of Columbus towards Nelsonville we had our first traffic situation, only 90 minutes into the trip.  Route 33 had a detour due to flooding which took us 45 minutes out of our way.  We could not tell the extent of the flooding on our detour but it was quite noticeable how bad the area must have been because we saw extensive damage once we were able to be routed back onto 33.

The kids were all set with their PSP's, Nintendo DS, X-Box, movies and all the other paraphernalia kids have these days.  The traffic delays did not bother them at this point!

We finally made it to another state and was making good time!

And then..... Several semi's had a pile-up going northbound on 77 in West Virginia right after the tunnel.  This kept us in a coasting traffic jam for close to 3 hours.  Things started to get hairy, although everyone stayed calm and we kept driving.

We switched drivers for a couple of hours until Mark couldn't stay awake any longer.  At this point it was almost midnight and we didn't want to pay for a hotel room when we would only be there for a few hours.  Wendy drove all night and got us into Florida at 4:30 in the morning!