Vacation Is Coming To an End

I managed to pre-schedule three weeks worth of posts covering our entire vacation–except this one. I am writing this on Friday evening, after spending a full day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and the driving nearly 3 hours north to Jacksonville Beach where we are spending the night. Tomorrow (or today, as you read this) we have an approximately 10-11 hour drive home. That’s driving time. I don’t expect to be home until around 10 pm Saturday evening.

Upon arriving home, I expect to find a lot of snow in the neighborhood. Our part of northern Virginia got slammed by a snow storm early this week. The storm had some unusual consequences–besides stranding drivers on I-95. For the first two weeks of our vacation, the kids were off from school for their winter break. We planned to take them out of school for the third week, knowing they would have some work to make up. We brought their school iPads with us so that they could see what they were missing and do some of the work on the drive home.

As it turned out, the entire week of school was canceled due to the weather and staffing shortages because of the weather. This was an incredible stroke of luck on our part. The kids did no miss a single day of school, despite spending the last six days at Walt Disney World.

We had a blast at Disney World, as we always do. This time we spent six days there, the longest we’ve ever spent. The first four days we were all energetic and eager to ride as many rides as we could. Yesterday, there was an obvious slowdown, and we even took a break from the parks in the afternoon to spent a few hours by the resort pool before returning to the parks for our dinner reservation. Today, we arrived at Hollywood Studios when it opened and crammed as much in as we could. We left the park at 5 pm and headed briefly to Magic Kingdom before we returned to our car for the drive north to Jacksonville Beach.

I was tired today. Perhaps my age is showing, but the constant running around from ride to ride, keeping up with the kids, combined with the heat at a time when it is normally cold just plain wore me down. I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation.

Tomorrow, we make the rest of the ride home, a little over 700 miles of driving in about 10 hours or so. It’ll make good use of the time, as I always do on a long drive, this time listening to more of Gore Vidal’s United States essays collection. I won’t finish it on the drive, but I’ll put a good dent in it.

Sunday is a day to settle back into the house, unpack the car, do lots of laundry, and in general prepare to re-enter the world of regular (i.e. non-vacation) life. I’ll have more to say about our vacation in future posts. For now, I’m heading to bed in order to get some sleep before the drive tomorrow.