Hey, I'm going to Disneyworld!!
 

Actually,the family and I went this past July and it was fun. My wife made all the arrangements, all I had to do was drive, the real focus of this post.

We have a '97 Town & Country AWD and I didn't fully appreciate how comfortable this vehicle was until the return trip. It's 900 miles from Disney to the house. We left there at 4:00 pm on a Friday and headed to Columbia, MD. I had planned to drive until about 10:00 pm and then finish the trip Saturday but by that time I had only covered about 200 miles due to traffic. Not wanting to drive 700 miles in one day I decided to drive on 'til midnight. Funny thing was that at midnight I still felt really good despite having spent 5 days trekking around Mickeyplanet. So I made the decision to drive straight through. This is where I learned a few things about the minivan, driving on I-95 in the middle of the night and myself.

The van didn't miss a beat. Everytime a car passed me I would let them get about a quarter mile ahead the match their speed until eventually I was going around...well, lets just say it was fun. Travelling as such I found the van would burn through a tank of gas every 4 hours. I did not see a single marked police car, something I thought was strange. However, at one gas station I did see two guys cuffed and sitting on the curb while cops emptied their car onto the parking lot. I also was passed by a Mark VIII that was going very fast and only had their headlights on, no other lights at all, not even when braking. I didn't even try to follow that car for very long. I also found that as the speed increased I lost interest in the radio and turned it off. We made it home by 8:00a.m. The wife and kids were well rested and ready for breakfast and after unloading the van, I was ready for a nap.

16hrs. & 900 miles is a good average(56)
Many of the trips I take to the races I average about the same or a little better. Unless you plan it just right traveling over a 12hr. period you always seem to get caught up in traffic somewhere along the way on I-95.

That sounds good, for the little drive time I have on I-95. Last summer, I went from near Minneapolis/St Paul home to Denver in 12.5 hours, 11 of which were on the road. I did it in my '99 diesel Ram. There is no way I could do that in my '91 diesel, since it would beat me soft. Comfort goes a long way!

torch

The only time I've done anything like that before was when I went with a friend to the 1982 Car Craft Magazine "Street Machine Nationals" somewhere in Illinoise, Springfield I think. We were in my friend's car, a 1971 Nova with a 427 and a 4-speed, and nothing else. This car looked good from the outside but...the interior wasn't done and there was no radio, no 8-track, no A/C. It had vinyl bucket seats, a rubber floor mat and the console wasn't done yet so we just stuffed towels around the hole in the floor to keep the heat out from the headers. It felt like we had driven half-way around the planet once we finally got there. The whole weekend I kept thinking about the return trip and dreading it. So of course, I did it again the next year.

I'm originally from NJ, but now live in Macon, Ga. Been here about 20 years now. I can't count the number of times I've driven back to Jersey from here. Door to door it's about 1060 mile (give or take a couple of miles for gas stops and such). My best guess during the last 20 years would be about 35 trips.

About 2 years ago, we flew up to Jersey for a funeral, we decided to drive back, so I rented a Town and Country. The rental companies usually have nicely equipped minivans, and this one was no exception. Four reclining chairs, DVD, front and rear A/C, power everything. It's a good thing, too. The drive home was absolutely horrible. A comfortable vehicle made it bareable.

All in all the trip ended up taking 23 hours. There was no room at the inn, either. We hadn't made plans to spend the night anywhere, and we left Clifton, NJ about 3pm. 12 hours later, we had only made it to Virginia. A 1060 trip that should have taken about 17 hours, took nearly a day to complete. Mostly because of the traffic in the north east corridor between NJ and DC. Half way through Va. the road opened. In all my trips back and forth, that was, by far, the worst.

Driving north is usually worse than driving south, because you hit the lower speed limits, and heavy traffic at the end of your trip. In this case, the drive south was not fun, either.

BTW, that was the same day as the big power black out in the north east a couple of years ago.