Hey all we have just gotten back and I wanted to write to agai thank you all for the input and write a quick report on the drive.
Agai leaving from Niagara falls Canada, me, wife, 1.5 year old.
The drive down went exactly as I'd planned, minus 2 hours or sleep. Stayed up til 6:30 am Friday, but instead of sleeping until 4 I got a call at 2pm from my day care provider asking to bath my son because he had a blow out ... lol. What a way to start a travel day.
Anyway left at 7:30pm, drove through the night, it was awesome to be honest at times I was the only dat I could see on the road especially through the mountains. Stopped for had at midnight and again at 6:30 am, made amazing time. We ended up checking in to out resort (POR for one night to start) at 4pm. I drove 5mph over (or more if other cars were doing so) the whole time EXCEPT on 19 !!!!!
Guys, THANK YOU so much for the warnings about 19. That changes speeds so many times and gosh damn the cops are waiting hidden in the gap between the north and south bound lanes, often in dark pockets after intersections just WAITING. Seriously there were more police on the southern half of 19 than the entire rest of the drive.
I was actually surprised how fast I was going at points, like in PA, because I had heard that US police were so hard on speeding. But I have a general rule: if the locals (people with state license plates) are flying by you .... speed up. Never be the fastest on the road, but be like in the 75th %. So yea i often found myself in PA, Georgia, Florida doing 10 - 15 over the limit and still getting passed.
I caught a couple zzzzz in the morning after my wife woke up. Enough to get me through to 11pm Saturday night and get me back on a regular schedule.
Drive back reaffirmed how smart a choice it was to drive through the night with an 18 month old. He was GOOD, really, we had a tablet with movies set up for him and stuff ... but there is only so much he can take strapped into that car seat. We had to split the drive back and the last 30 mins he just cried, actually sad sad cried. Not just fussy 18 month old. He was SAD. It was heartbreaking .. but thankfully short lived.
Drive back, left at 12:30 Friday afternoon.. wanted to stay longer but basically asked yourself how much 4 more hours in MK meant vs getting 4 more hours of driving in ... keep in mind we were there for 2 weeks, the value of those 4 hours differs if you are there a shorter period. Drove to Hamptonville NC, made a couple stops along the way to let the little man stretch and run, checked in at 11pm. Intended to get up and leave at like 6 or 7 .... woke up at 8:30 Yea, so, got moving quick and headed out around 9am.
Again had to make a couple stops but tried to keep them as short as possible, got in at 7:30pm.
So trip down 20.5 hours with a few stops Saturday day, decently long stops at that. Return trip: 20.45 hours but only short stops and broken over two days.
Trip down left Friday night checked in Sat afternoon. Return left Friday at lunch didnt get home til Saturday night. Despite that both trips look like total car time was similar, the trip down we took more than an hour for breakfast, just ran out side playing and total time fro. Departure to check in was 20.5 hours. Return trip we kept breaks to a minimum, stopped to sleep, still similar road time but total trip time 30.5 hours and we had a VERY unhappy child.
That's our experience. Keep in mind that actual road time down was less than 18 hours (including the absolute mess of i4) So IF you can keep stops to a minimum with food and entertainment in car ... you could do this in under 20 hours easily.
But I wanted to thank you all for the insight and advice !
