Hey everyone! Thought I'd try and get some of Day 1 in before Christmas!
As some of you may remember from my last TR, we always drive to WDW and stop in Nashville, TN and Gainesville, FL before getting to WDW. So rewind back to June 14, 2008. It's 5 a.m. and my alarm goes off. It's the
only time I'm happy to get up that early. I get out of bed...and start dancing
. Everyone is in the car and we're backing out of the driveway around 6 a.m. We stop about an hour and half into the trip and eat breakfast at Bob Evans. After breakfast, we're ready for the long trip to Nashville for the night! It was pretty uneventful with the occasional stops for gas, bathroom breaks, and just to stretch our legs.
We got into Nashville around 5 p.m. or so. We got checked into our usual hotel and headed back out to the car. As some of you may remember from my last TR, when in Nashville, we always go to Opryland Mall and walk around and eat at Rainforest Cafe. Here's a pic of us in the parking lot last year:
After we ate, we headed back to the hotel to get a good night's sleep before another long day in the car! Again, we woke up around 5 a.m. and left the parkinglot a little after 6 a.m. We drove about 2 hours and stopped at a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Then, we began our long journey through the mountains and then our long journey through the long state of Georgia (geeze Dawn). We
finally got into FL and into Gainesville around 5 or 6 p.m. We checked into our usual hotel and as some of you may remember from my last TR, we then head to Red Lobster
. We had the nicest waitress and told her we were heading to WDW and she asked if we had ever been there before. I laughed and said "This will be trip #19 for me!" After we ate, we headed to Walgreens to pick up some necessities that we had forgotten at home. Then, we headed back to the room to get ready for bed...And I started looking at some of my WDW books that I had gotten before we left. I already know pretty much everything they tell you in there (from the DIS), but I still like to read them.
I could
not get to sleep. I never can the night before. Morning couldn't come fast enough. I kept waking up and checking the clock. Finally it was morning and time to get to WDW! We left our hotel and drove to Ocala to eat at our usual Bob Evans. Then, we were on the home stretch! Pretty soon we started seeing WDW billboards and I started my dancing and screaming.
My DSis thinks I'm a freak because I do this every year
. Here's what we started seeing. Sorry some of them are blurry:
This was our first time staying at OKW so it was weird not driving through the MK gates to WL! We found OKW okay and I had to take pics of us arriving:
*Continued in next post*
And you're welcome about the whole TTA thing..
...I didn't go outside at all today! I was afraid to! 
Sounds like a great start to the trip and OKW is beautiful! It seems like that resort is a little more low-key than some of the others, did you find it to be that way?
