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May Family Visit Travelog #2
Parked at a Wawa near BWI · Tue 19 May 2026. 7am.
It's 4am California time, but already it's 7am here in Maryland. The sun is up. We feel like death warmed over from barely sleeping on an overnight flight. And we're sitting in a rental car in the parking lot of a convenience store near BWI airport, eating a breakfast of a pepperoni stick, a few balls of cheese, a cup of donut holes, and a quart of Coke Zero. (Well, that's my breakfast. Hawk's is less well balanced.)
Last night I shared that we're traveling to visit my inlaws in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for my mother-in-law's birthday. Well, the overnight flight we took from San Jose didn't take us all the way to Harrisburg. We only flew as far as Baltimore, Maryland. That's by design as H'burg has a tiny airport with only connecting service to/from major hubs like Chicago, Washington, and New York. Instead we caught a non-stop flight to BWI. We've rented a car and we'll drive from here. The drive is about 1h45m minutes in light traffic.
The timing on this is not ideal. First of all, the flight was a red-eye. That is not ideal. But it's the lesser of two evils. The reality of geography and time zones is that flying from California to the East Coast is a tradeoff of either a) burn a whole day flying, or b) get a crummy night's sleep flying. I routinely choose (b) when flying to visit family.
And nowadays Southwest Airlines offers an SJC-BWI nonstop. SJC is less than 10 miles from our house, and BWI is the closest major airport to Harrisburg. (Baltimore, MD is actually closer than Philadelphia, PA.) That means no more schlepping up to SFO, which is half an hour further from home, to fly United to IAD, which is at least half an hour further from Harrisburg.
The second thing that's not ideal about this timing is that right now it's 7am. On a weekday. That means rush hour traffic. That's not a huge deal, really. It just means the drive will take longer. And that's partly why we're taking a quick breakfast break right now, at 7am, at a Wawa convenience store near BWI. We're tanking up here on food and drink before we hit the road to Harrisburg.
Parked at a Wawa near BWI · Tue 19 May 2026. 7am.
It's 4am California time, but already it's 7am here in Maryland. The sun is up. We feel like death warmed over from barely sleeping on an overnight flight. And we're sitting in a rental car in the parking lot of a convenience store near BWI airport, eating a breakfast of a pepperoni stick, a few balls of cheese, a cup of donut holes, and a quart of Coke Zero. (Well, that's my breakfast. Hawk's is less well balanced.)
Last night I shared that we're traveling to visit my inlaws in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for my mother-in-law's birthday. Well, the overnight flight we took from San Jose didn't take us all the way to Harrisburg. We only flew as far as Baltimore, Maryland. That's by design as H'burg has a tiny airport with only connecting service to/from major hubs like Chicago, Washington, and New York. Instead we caught a non-stop flight to BWI. We've rented a car and we'll drive from here. The drive is about 1h45m minutes in light traffic.
The timing on this is not ideal. First of all, the flight was a red-eye. That is not ideal. But it's the lesser of two evils. The reality of geography and time zones is that flying from California to the East Coast is a tradeoff of either a) burn a whole day flying, or b) get a crummy night's sleep flying. I routinely choose (b) when flying to visit family.
And nowadays Southwest Airlines offers an SJC-BWI nonstop. SJC is less than 10 miles from our house, and BWI is the closest major airport to Harrisburg. (Baltimore, MD is actually closer than Philadelphia, PA.) That means no more schlepping up to SFO, which is half an hour further from home, to fly United to IAD, which is at least half an hour further from Harrisburg.
The second thing that's not ideal about this timing is that right now it's 7am. On a weekday. That means rush hour traffic. That's not a huge deal, really. It just means the drive will take longer. And that's partly why we're taking a quick breakfast break right now, at 7am, at a Wawa convenience store near BWI. We're tanking up here on food and drink before we hit the road to Harrisburg.
