Your husband should be up for father of the year/husband of the year……
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Absolutely 
Curious how far north you are and how long the drive is. S24 may very well end up at Bama (we are on MA) and that drive seems daunting enough for us to assume will will fly, rent a car and buy all his stuff down there, rather than drive from here.
We are in NE PA. It’s 14 hours, give or take.
So far, we have driven and flown/rented a car. The trauma of the drive depends on your car, your tolerance for excessive road trips and your ability to find serenity via music or audiobooks or podcasts, I think.
For us, the drive goes through some gorgeous parts of PA, then the Shenandoah Valley and the Smokies, which is so much better than I-95…
Flying isn’t easy. There’s no airport in Tuscaloosa, so the closest possible place is Birmingham (an hour’s drive), but finding cheap airfare from there is extremely difficult. And you’ll most likely not have a nonstop flight.
That said, I found a RT from Birmingham to Allentown PA for $400 for Thanksgiving break, and I was deliriously happy.
Usually, however, for the best price, you’d fly to/out of Atlanta. Or even Nashville (each is about 3 or 4 hours away, but there’s a time zone change with Atlanta; not with Nashville).
By the time you factor in getting to the airport, going through security/waiting, a layover someplace, renting a car, then driving 3/4 hours, it is really not a huge time savings to fly. And the cost for multiple people is just exponentially more than driving.
Hope this helps - it is certainly a cost to factor in when considering where to go to college!
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Thanks. When we visited last April we had the pleasure of dealing with ATL 
No direct flights to BHM from Boston so def an all day event regardless. But I also loathe road trips, especially with a jam-packed car…
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Maybe try Nashville. It’s really not that much farther, and I think it’s much more pleasant (that’s where hubby flew out of on Monday). Also! No danger of forgetting the time change and being an hour late for your Atlanta flight home!
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Maybe we will try that if he goes down again before deciding to see what that’s like. Def have direct BOS-Nashville
stares at the conversation in Alaskan
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Ha! We live in Portland OR and i was just thinking 14 hours? That’s not too bad! No comparison to Alaska though. Our daughter is 1800 miles away and we’ve thought about driving her car down to her.
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I did it from NYC to ATL, and for us it made sense for to drive down, one parent flew down two days later, and eventually both parents flew back. While we could have powered through in one day, we chose the PA route for scenery/sanity instead of I95, and stopped over at a highway motel in Roanoke (more than halfway), spending a relaxing evening, strolling through and having a nice dinner in their little downtown.
Unexpectedly, our daughter has repeatedly been able to find rather affordable ATL/NYC flights (being flexible with days/times due to her class schedule helps) - which somehow never works for me. I’m not a huge fan of someone spending that much time behind the wheel, twice, if it can be helped/afforded.
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Seems like easterners have a different conception of distance. D18 was happy doing SF-SLC in a day (12 hours) on her own, and from SLC anywhere within 5 hours was close. Mammoth for a weekend of skiing (8 hours) was fine, even Banff (16 hours) made an appealing spring break trip.
It’s a big adjustment with S23 being an hour away when we had expected him to be 13 hours away in Tucson.
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Not sure this is and Easterner v Westerners issue but rather a drivers v non-drivers issue. By drivers, I mean people who actually enjoy or really don’t mind driving long distances.
I’m an Easterner now in the Midwest and don’t think anything of driving 5-7 hrs in a day, I agree that’s a pretty easy drive. Have done plenty of 12-14hr driving days as a matter of course. And we chose to drive to Florida from the midwest (17-22hrs over two days depending on final location) plenty of times because we found that cheaper and easier than traveling on a plane with 3 small children.
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Yeah, we think nothing of very long drives - then again, my commute to work has always been 90 minutes or more, so it’s baked in.
The kids - being carried on those commutes while I was pregnant - I really think it had an effect. They’re both the same way. They did a sibling bonding trip to Yellowstone last summer, and the end was a nonstop 40-hour drive home, where they switched off, 10 hours on, 10 hours off.
Whereas my step-grandkids, both of them, are completely unmanageable on even a half-hour’s drive.
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I think that the large empty spaces between cities makes driving in the west and midwest very different from the east coast. 8 hours of urban driving, even on freeways like DC-New England, is far more challenging than (say) Reno to SLC “continue straight for more than 500 miles” (as my car’s GPS tells me).
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All three of my kids love driving as well. When they are all home, they fight over who gets to drive on trips they take together. 
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It is definitely different driving. I was raised driving on the east coast. And traffic driving is very much its own thing. Probably one of the reasons I didn’t go crazy when I moved to the midwest and have been driving in Chicagoland traffic for over 2 decades now.
But I still think it is about liking to drive and not liking to drive whether one finds longer drives easy or not. I don’t mind the crowded drives nor the long wide open drives. But everyone in our family loves listening to the radio, as well as books on tape. And playing the Alphabet Game, Tractors Horses and Corpses (aka cemeteries), “On the way to Grandmother’s House…”, and other car games.
We are suckers for checking out stuff off the beaten path as well as kitschy roadside attractions (yes we will stop to see Paul Bunyon and Blue in statue form, as well as the largest ball of twine). And we don’t mind diner food, Waffle House and Cracker Barrel.
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Probably because my only frame of reference for long car trips includes I-95, NJ Turnpike and other assorted horrendous east coast driving 
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Yes 100%
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Actually I like driving. Have done my share of highway driving at 130 mph (naturally abroad).
For me it’s rather a “driver v the other drivers issue”. 
(I find it stressful having to constantly anticipate/compensate for everyone else, to increase my odds at survival.)
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We need an Alaskan-Lower 48 translator over here!
On the plus side, d22, despite only coming home for big breaks, made MVP on AK Airlines.
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