Last week we headed out for a vacation up in Ontario's Georgian Bay area. My mom has a summer cottage up there; it's a beautiful region, with thousands of rocky islands covered in evergreen forest. Like most Georgian Bay cottages, ours is accessible only by water; you have to drive a couple of hours north of Toronto to a marina and transfer to a boat to get there.

Last year, we flew into Toronto and rented a car to get us to the marina. It was a good plan on paper, but our luggage missed our connection and had to take a later flight. When it arrived it had to be located and cleared through customs, and by the time we reached the marina, it was getting dark. This was a pretty serious problem because you have to navigate pretty carefully - there are a lot of rocks and shallow places that are hard to see, even in the daytime. My stepdad, who is a pretty accomplished boater, had never taken the trip out to the cottage at night - there's just typically no need to do so.

So last year's trip out to the island was taken at a slow crawl through absolute darkness, with me perching on the bow of the boat sweeping a battery-powered spotlight back and forth and marking the locations of any rocks I saw. My mom relayed instructions back and forth and peered over a navigational chart. It was nerve-wracking, but we made it.

And it wasn't just that trip, either; the last few trips we've taken by air have been disasters - connections missed, hours lingering in unfamiliar airports (try this with a grumpy toddler), luggage misplaced, etc. We've completely lost faith in air travel and its ability to get us there on time with all our stuff.

So this year, we opted to drive the whole way from Richmond. It would mean taking a couple of extra days of vacation, but we wanted to visit my dad in Buffalo and go to Farm Sanctuary and the Baltimore aquarium. Since we have two kids in carseats now, and we'd be picking up my grandparents at the Buffalo airport for the trip, we rented a minivan.

Well, I put 1,651 miles on that Grand Caravan and I'm here to tell you: minivans are the best form of road transportation ever invented.

Yeah, they have a reputation for being uncool. In my opinion, they have overcome it. They're like rolling family battle platforms. The doors open by remote control. There's storage in the floor, much like the Millenium Falcon, and also in the roof and console. The rear seats fold up like Transformers. There's a digital compass/trip meter/gastankometer. There are climate zones, which basically means that Chewbacca can run the A/C so his nose doesn't dry out, while Han can run the heater to banish the unpleasant memory of the carbonite. And it can travel across most of the galaxy without refueling, which helps you avoid potential trouble spots like Mos Eisley. (Seriously, I bought gas in Hamilton, Ontario, and then again somewhere near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I mean, this baby has range.)

Ours didn't even have the fancy stuff like GPS navigation or a DVD system, which would have been even better. I understand that these days, you can pop a DVD into the dash and the kids can listen to it on headphones. This allows you to (gasp!) have an adult conversation, or listen to music that isn't about talking animals.

All in all it was a pretty great trip - the kids handled it well, despite the long hours of driving, and it was a hell of a lot more pleasant than air travel. And it's good to know that we like minivans; if we have another kid, we'll have no choice anyway (other than a large SUV, which isn't appealing at all to us). We were sorry to turn it back in. There'll even be a hybrid Sienna at some point, so that would soothe our liberal guilt further (although we got a respectable 26 mpg, according to the tankometer). Yeah, sign me up.