Day/Night 1: Drive South

The car is packed to the gills. Steven is strapped in to his car seat. Bonnie sneaks into the passenger seat. I suck down a Mountain Dew and away we go. Our theme song for the vacation:

We hit the road – but wait, we must first make a trip to Wal-Mart. What do we need? A small cooler to hold Steven's medicine, a couple of Mountain Dews and our official corporate sponsor of the drive – Red Bull.

After gassing up and enjoying the scene at the Wal Mart in Macclenny, we were now officially on vacation and the road to Alabama.

Alas, that lasted about an hour before we made our first official pit stop at a rest area. At this point, I would like to thank the creators of the Eisenhower Interstate System and the wisdom of creating rest areas. That was a CRUCIAL part of this trip in being able to break up the drive.

So, we get out at our first rest area and Steven wants to get down and run around. There's nothing like running around at rest area. You have no clue what has been going on there previously and there's no telling how many animals have done their business on these hallowed grounds. So, with a careful eye on all the ground around Steven, we let him loose and he terrorized the trees and all the pine needles in the area.

30 minutes later – we loaded up again and resumed our journey.

We hit a McDonald's drive thru in Lake City for dinner and end up making pretty good time by hitting Tallahassee around 9:30 p.m. We're now 33.3 percent of the way to our ancestral homeland.

Fortunately for us, Steven is great a sleeping in the car seat – so once we got going and it got dark, he checked out. The only problem was that he would get startled and wake up screaming since he was still strapped into the car seat. Bonnie used her flexibility for the greater good by rubbing Steven's leg to calm him down.

The first Red Bull came on the western side of Tallahassee. That got me through Troy, where we got gas shortly after midnight. The question in the car was to we get a hotel room or continue or trek? Being the only person awake in the car at the time, I made the executive decision to continue forward.

We pushed on and finally had to stop at a rest area on the north side of Clanton for our final pit stop. It's around 2 a.m. and these guys in an old van have stopped as well and have gotten into a riveting conversation with the rest area attendant about Dungeons & Dragons – as I believe they were on their way to a convention. It was then that I knew we needed to get back on the road quickly before some wizard came jumping out of the woods.

Steven was fantastic the entire time and when we rolled into Bonnie's parents house at 3:30 a.m., it was time to play!

Exhausted, we trudged inside and Steven was hell on wheels for about 90 minutes before I was able to finally call it a night – at 5 a.m.

Hello vacation!