I returned home late last week from our 3rd drive to WDW from Wisconsin. (I apologize to our thread founder
@BC1836 for not giving an update on I4 -- I didn't venture online except to check emails until this past weekend. And besides that, I got my directions all messed up and realized that we wouldn't be taking I4 this trip, except for a trip to Disney Springs from our overnight stay at the Drury Inn in the Universal Studios area.)
Our drive down was split into three days, mainly to accommodate for any sketchy winter driving conditions. Thankfully, we had no issues whatsoever, with weather or with traffic. We drove 10 hours from Wisconsin to Manchester, TN the first day. Day 2 was a shorter (6-hour) drive to Valdosta, GA, with a brief stop in Vienna, GA to pick up some treats at Ellis Brothers Pecans. We chose Valdosta largely because we really like Drury Inn hotels, and that was the one on our route that made the most sense at which to stop. Then day three was a short 3-hour drive to Disney Springs. I have mixed feelings on a 3-day drive. On one hand, it allowed us to get to Disney Springs before lunch, so we could spend our day there before checking into the Orlando Drury Inn (which we only stayed in one night until we checked into Bay Lake Tower for the remainder of the trip.) On the other hand, I feel like we wasted a lot of time in a hotel room when we could have been driving. Our next drive will be sometime in the late summer of 2019, so we'll have to figure out a good plan for that drive.
The drive home was just as pleasant. Around noon on Feb 13, we drove from Bay Lake back to the Drury Inn in Valdosta. We stayed the night there, drove to Mt Vernon, IL the next day, and then home on Feb 15. This allowed us to time our drive to avoid all major rush hour traffic in Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, and Chicago. The only issue we had was some tree removal in Nashville, which slowed traffic to a crawl for about 5 minutes until we got through it. We had a little rain on the drive home as well, but nothing that affected our drive at all. I'm 99.9% certain we'll replicate this drive next time.
Now it is back to reality. Ugh.