I get a lot of questions when it comes to family vacation, so I thought I would take a few moments and explain why we drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My inlaws own property in Florida, and for the past 17 years my wife and I have gone down once or twice a year. We have taken different routes, driven at different times of the day, and we have varied the number of days of driving. We’ve gone down and spent a week, as well as stayed for an extended period of time after #3 was born so that the kids could relax, and I could work from the condo an join the family here and there for pool time together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the years we’ve discovered that it’s a relatively cheap vacation for us…if we drive. This seems to be the one thing that people get caught up on…so let me demo some numbers for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I were to fly and score the deal of the century on flights…$99 a seat. It would cost me $500 to fly down, probably $100 in luggage fee’s, car rental (van) in florida is almost $1000 a week. So that’s $2500 in just transportation costs, and 2\/3 of that cost will be in US dollars too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Driving down costs us $200 in gas, and I can stay at hotels using points that I’ve earned with business trips, hockey & cheer tournaments. Adding in hotel and food along the way we’re usually in the $500 range to get down, and another $500 to get back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before we go I will take the van into Honda and have them give it the once over. I explain what we’re doing and ask for the “what needs to be done for a safe 5000km drive”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we run into issues, yes…it could be a hassle, but car parts are also significantly cheaper in the US than they are here…and many services are also much cheaper to perform. I’ve actually done scheduled maintenance on the van in the US and saved hundreds of dollars in one trip (transmission fluid service).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We’ve done many things over the years to entertain the kids on the drive. The smartest was to provide each kid an ipad, and use offlline Netflix and Disney+ for the drive. We used to have a plex server that I would use on a laptop, and had wifi setup in the car so that the kids could watch movies and play Minecraft…I may setup wifi in the car permanently…but the Plex server is now outdated and complex enough that it’s actually a hassle to use now…so for the kids…Netflix and Disney are perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not ever easy, but it’s a beautiful drive and we’ve learned to take our time and deal with the slowdowns as they come. That’s really what you want to do on a vacation anyways, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I get a lot of questions when it comes to family vacation, so I thought I would take a few moments and explain why we drive. My inlaws own property in Florida, and for the past 17 years my wife and I have gone down once or twice a year. We have taken different routes, … Continue reading Why we drive to Florida.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[83],"tags":[84,85],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-florida","tag-drive","tag-florida","without-featured-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8DcKP-jx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1212,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions\/1212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/io.bainwerx.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}