Of course that was just the beginning of our planning. We were SO excited but wanted to travel on a budget. The show is every February, which is one of our slower months out of the year. So we started looking at all of our travel options. Of course, we decided it would be so much fun to travel on the Mega Bus, a double-decker bus with routes all over the US. It was only $52 per person, round trip.

We left the night of Feb 19th, at midnight. Rob drove us to the bus station in Atlanta and we waited in line to board. When we got on the bus with a large group, Kristin and I ended up with seats right next to each other….MISTAKE. By the time we realized this, everyone around us had taken up every row and stretched out to sleep. Here we were, stuck in two tiny seats, with no room. The bus ride went on forever. The WiFi didn’t work. I felt nauseous. I would doze off for short intervals but woke up at every stop along the way. We watched the sun rise as we were cruising down the Florida interstate.

The bus pulled up to the Orlando stop just a few minutes before 8 AM. We caught a cab and headed to the Embassy Suites, where we planned to stay that night. Obviously it was way too early to check in, so we sat in the lobby and recovered from our ride before taking another bus over to the Orlando Convention Center. At this point, I was so excited, I don’t think the exhaustion had hit me yet.

I can’t really being to explain how large this event is. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors. There are tractor trailers parked in the middle of the convention center with massive aquariums built into them. There are dogs, cats and exotic animals everywhere. Unless you are running, it is impossible to walk past every booth in one day. We had planned to visit a few vendors that we knew we wanted to meet, but other than that, we did a lot of calculated wandering. I am one of those people that really wants to see it all, not miss an aisle, etc so we worked on just that. So we walked and walked, and then we walked some more.

That night we devised a plan to go back and place orders with any of the vendors we really wanted to buy from. So the morning of February 21st, we got up, packed and headed back to the show for a few hours. We placed some orders and had lunch before grabbing a taxi back to the bus station. I was ready to see Charles and get home, but we had to endure another 8 hour trip, with no working WiFi again…

The bus ride home seemed so much longer and I was feeling so sick I couldn’t stand it. We stopped at a truck stop and didn’t have any options for food that sounded appetizing, so I grabbed a cup of vegetables and we got back on the bus for a few more hours. Charles picked us up at the Atlanta bus station at 10 PM on Thursday night. Forty-eight hours from the beginning of our journey, we were finally home.

On the way home