Monday, November 27, 2006
HOLIDAY TRAVEL
Right after Halloween, my wife decided to have a Thanksgiving party. She wanted to have a real Thanksgiving with all our friends before familial obligations hallmarked the craziness of the season. All our friends loved the idea. Everyone came over when they could during the evening, each bringing a dish to complement the turkey my wife prepared. Most people wanted to bring pie, but we had a varied amount of dishes and plenty of food for everyone to eat at their leisure. “Opportunistic grazing at it’s finest” my wife called it.
A week later my wife’s sister arrived for a visit from Oregon. Our party was originally planned to coincide with her vacation, but her plans changed after we had already made ours. That weekend we drove up to New Jersey to visit their family, and, since she would be returning home before the end of the month, it was decided to have Thanksgiving dinner that weekend. The family loved the idea for the same reason our friends did, as it avoided the holiday travel craze and freed everyone up to do something different for Thanksgiving.
In our case, instead of driving to New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s parents, last Wednesday we drove down to North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with my siblings. My wife picked me up from my office in Elkridge at 1:00 p.m., and we headed down I-95. Now, I know full well that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the heaviest travel day of the year, but I guess I was naïve in my belief that we’d be okay leaving in the middle of the day. I figured traffic would be heavy, but barring accidents I didn’t expect any real trouble. Traffic was actually pretty light and smooth for a while. But south of DC, where the Washington Beltway empties out into I-95 proper, things ground to a halt. No accidents that I could see, just too much traffic for a three-lane road, I guess. What was frustrating was that the HOV lane was moving along almost car free as we were crawling past it. We would have gotten on it as an alternative, but when we came up to the ONLY on-ramp for it, it was just as backed up as the regular road so we opted to stay where we were. Once darkness fell, there was a period of intense rain for a storm moving up the coast, which also made for some slow (or at least, nervous) driving. What Mapquest clocks as a five-hour drive took us 9-and-a-half.
So another Thanksgiving was spent, this time with my brother and sister and their families. It was nice, especially seeing nieces and nephews I hardly ever get to spend time with. We lazed about at my sister’s house, helped my brother hang his Christmas lights, met my nephew’s friends, and did our best to polish off the leftovers. We opted to drive back Saturday night to avoid the Sunday crush. Four-and-a-half-hours.
A week later my wife’s sister arrived for a visit from Oregon. Our party was originally planned to coincide with her vacation, but her plans changed after we had already made ours. That weekend we drove up to New Jersey to visit their family, and, since she would be returning home before the end of the month, it was decided to have Thanksgiving dinner that weekend. The family loved the idea for the same reason our friends did, as it avoided the holiday travel craze and freed everyone up to do something different for Thanksgiving.
In our case, instead of driving to New Jersey to spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s parents, last Wednesday we drove down to North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with my siblings. My wife picked me up from my office in Elkridge at 1:00 p.m., and we headed down I-95. Now, I know full well that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the heaviest travel day of the year, but I guess I was naïve in my belief that we’d be okay leaving in the middle of the day. I figured traffic would be heavy, but barring accidents I didn’t expect any real trouble. Traffic was actually pretty light and smooth for a while. But south of DC, where the Washington Beltway empties out into I-95 proper, things ground to a halt. No accidents that I could see, just too much traffic for a three-lane road, I guess. What was frustrating was that the HOV lane was moving along almost car free as we were crawling past it. We would have gotten on it as an alternative, but when we came up to the ONLY on-ramp for it, it was just as backed up as the regular road so we opted to stay where we were. Once darkness fell, there was a period of intense rain for a storm moving up the coast, which also made for some slow (or at least, nervous) driving. What Mapquest clocks as a five-hour drive took us 9-and-a-half.
So another Thanksgiving was spent, this time with my brother and sister and their families. It was nice, especially seeing nieces and nephews I hardly ever get to spend time with. We lazed about at my sister’s house, helped my brother hang his Christmas lights, met my nephew’s friends, and did our best to polish off the leftovers. We opted to drive back Saturday night to avoid the Sunday crush. Four-and-a-half-hours.
Labels: driving, holidays, travel
# posted by Renfield @ 10:40 AM 
