Figure out what day of the week you are leaving and then what works best for your family so far as departure times and how long you can take it in the car for one day! If a weekday, you want to avoid the DC area between 6 and 10 AM and 3-7PM. I am about an hour and ten minutes from the DE Memorial Bridge, and my preferred plan is to leave by 2:30 AM, passing DC by 5:30 AM, driving straight through and arriving that evening at WDW. Everyone else slept in the car till somewhere in NC. A couple of weeks ago though I had to pick someone up at a DC metro stop first, so altered my plans. I picked them up at 12:30 PM on a Friday, then drove to Henderson GA, so only had another 4 hours to go the second day. We arrived at the hotel in GA around 11 pm. There was some congestion in VA and a little more volume here and there, which added a total of maybe 60 minutes compared to my usual early morning drives, but otherwise nothing else was noticeably different. There are lots of good places to spend the night if you feel you cannot do it all in one day. If you determine the number of hours you think you can drive that first day, and thus the general area you will reach, then people here can help with the places they have stopped. The drive home we did a straight through, leaving WDW at 7 AM and arriving home a little after midnight. Again there was a little congestion in VA (it was a Sunday and maybe around 8 pm or so) which caused a delay of around 30 minutes.