For me it was supposed to be a day of preparation. My 2001 Walt Disney World vacation was to begin that afternoon, as I finished my final packing and headed out to my friend Frank's house, where I would spend the night on his cramped, dog-hair covered sofa, before our 7am plane ride to Orlando the next morning. Osama bin Laden changed all of that.
Instead of working, I spent that day flitting from radio to radio, TV to TV, and person to person, trying to keep abreast of the awful events in New York and Washington. And in the back of my mind, I knew that my vacation was going to have to be cancelled. "Looks like you're not going anywhere, Will," my co-workers kept repeating. Well, by the end of lunch time (which was spent in the Jacuzzi chat room with some dear Clubhouse friends), I had decided that I couldn't handle the strain of trying to work and follow the news at the same time. So I packed my stuff and prepared to go home... only to have my cell phone ring just before I walked out of my cube.
It was Frank. He hadn't been on vacation in three years, since his divorce. Frank is a WDW addict; his ex-wife's family lives in the Orlando area, so he used to go to WDW two, three, even four times a year. I could never understand why he didn't get a yearly pass! But since the divorce, no Disney. He was getting desperate for a vacation, and when I answered my cell phone that afternoon, I could hear the outrage in his voice, not only at the murders of so many people, but at the possibility of cancelling our trip. We discussed the possibility of postponing for a week ("But by then we might be at war!" I told him), and the possibility of cancelling the trip altogether ("No way!" said I, with some explatives thrown in that shocked the co-workers who surrounded me, listening to the call). But while in the Jacuzzi at lunch, KingTriton had asked me simply "You gonna drive it?" I told him, "I don't know. I may have to." Sure enough, when I said, "Okay, let's drive it!", Frank agreed, and we were off.
I rushed home to secure the house, pick up my bags, and get a change of clothes... then remembered that I had forgotten to fill in my time sheet before leaving work. After a failed attempt to do it over the web (DAMN JAVA!), I called a co-worker, gave her my password, and had her fill in the time sheet for me. Then another quick call to Frank, shutdown of the computer, and I left my house.
At Frank's house, I filled his parking space with my precious Xterra, and we tossed our bags in the back of his much larger and more comfy Chevy Astro, secured his house, and off we went. We left Baltimore at 6:10pm (taking US 301 south until just north of Richmond, because we'd heard that I-495 was shut down around Washington DC), and drove all night, switching off driving about every 3 hours, to arrive at the check-in lot of All-Star Music at a bright 8:30am on Wednesday, September 12th, 2001. Our Vacation had begun!