Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Thanksgiving Travelog #9
Camp Hill, PA - Wed, 22 Nov 2023. 11pm.

Wednesday afternoon/evening it was time to switch families for our Thanksgiving family visit. That meant switching locales. We left from my sister's house in northern Virginia in the late afternoon to drive to my inlaws' house outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

From years in the past I remember day-before-Thanksgiving, aka Thanksgiving Eve, road trips being brutal. Traffic was awful all up and down the major arteries. The past few years, at least, it hasn't been so bad. For example, in 2021 our Thanksgiving Eve drive was smooth sailing— even from downtown Washington, D.C.

...Okay, but in 2021 that could have been lingering reduction in traffic from the pandemic era. Well, this year record holiday travel is forecast, particularly for people driving places. What did that mean for us?

Our Thanksgiving Eve trip was not totally smooth sailing but it was still pretty easy. Traffic maps showed us the usual driving route up to Harrisburg, sticking to major highways the whole way, had slowdowns in a few areas. A backroads route around the outskirts of the DC area was faster by about 15 minutes. Of course, even that "backroads" route involved a few 6-lane highways. I still think of them as backroads because years ago they were all narrow 2-lanes... with traffic backed up for miles at commute times. What a difference better roads make.

Thanksgiving Travelog #5
Washington, DC - Sun, 19 Nov 2023. 9:45am.

Today Hawk and I are visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Our tickets aren't until 10am, though, when the museum first opens, and we arrived in town at 9:30am. That means there's time for an impromptu tour of Washington, DC!

After passing by the Pentagon and seeing the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument as we drove into town via I-395 and the 14th Street Bridge, we parked on Independence Ave just off 14th Street. It's half a block from the museum and not much further from various other things....



This view of the Washington Monument isn't from our parking space, but it is close. We crossed to the west side of 14th Street and took a few steps up onto the grass. Yes, one of the cool things about Washington, DC is that lots of iconic places are practically right next to each other.



As you walk north on 14th Street from Independence Ave you cross the National Mall. This is a huge lawn bookended by the Capitol to the east and... frankly, the Lincoln Memorial to the west. The Washington Monument is somewhere in the middle. Across the Mall from 14th Street you can pretty easily see the Capitol. It may look close but it's actually not. It's over a mile across the lawn to the building.



We concluded our mini-tour by looping back to our parked car to stow our heavy jackets, figuring we won't want to drag them around inside the museum. The pic above is of Independence Ave, where we parked. (Ours is one of the vehicles on the right.) I included this photo to show just how close to downtown we were able to park.

Street parking is free in Washington on Sundays. It's a policy designed specifically to encourage tourism. Of course, a wide-open street like this will be filled up by later in the day.

Choosing an early time for our tickets was part of a plan to keep things simple. By leaving relatively early in the morning we completed the 24 mile drive into the city with no traffic slowdowns. And we were able to park right away, no circling the blocks, just steps from the museum. This is so much better than the weekday travel default of parking at a satellite location on the Metro Rail system and riding a train into town. Plus, having the car with us makes it easy to visit some friends who live about 10 miles north of here for dinner this evening.

"Thanksgiving Eve"... is that a thing? I think you know what I mean, though: the night before Thanksgiving. It's one of the bigger travel days of the year (Sunday following Thanksgiving is the biggest) when people travel to visit friends or relatives elsewhere in the country. Most hit the roads and airports in the evening, after finishing the school- and work day, and travel late into the night to be there in time for holiday dinner on Thursday.

I remember so many Wednesday evening trips when traffic was a complete mess. Delays often added hours to the drive. I braced for that last night as we prepared to drive from Washington, D.C. to my inlaws' house in Harrisburg, PA.

"It's showing 2 hours 15 minutes," Hawk noted early in the day, referring to what mapping apps indicated at the time.

"Yeah, but we'll see how bad it is at 4 or 5pm," I warned. Internally I was prepared for our 2h15m drive to take 4 hours or longer due to holiday traffic.

Well, 5:30pm came around (we stayed in DC later than expected) and maps apps showed that our 2:15 drive had grown to... 2:17. LOLWUT?!

Indeed, Thanksgiving Eve traffic was... on holiday 😉... this year. From 14th & C Streets SW in downtown DC we drove south across the 14th Street Bridge with no traffic and looped onto the George Washington Parkway headed north. Traffic on the parkway moved at the speed limit until the right lane slowed down a bit for the exit ramp onto the Beltway (I-495). The Beltway was slow for a few miles as it crossed the bridge into Maryland but never stop-and-go; and it sped up to the limit as we neared the I-270 split. Commuter-heavy I-270 flowed smoothly, its monstrous 12 lane width doing what it was designed to do (i.e., keep us all moving). And even as it narrowed down from 12 lanes to 8 to 6 to just 4 (2 in each direction) further north, the volume of traffic tapered down with it such that I rarely dipped below the speed limit.

The only delay on our trip was stopping for dinner and impulse shopping in Germantown, MD. I'd figured we'd stop for dinner anyway... but as a much-needed break from driving in bad traffic. Instead it was leisurely. That stop pushed back arrival at my inlaws' house to 9pm. Still, it was early enough to stay up and chat with them for a few hours, rather than us arriving 2 hours later and wanting to go straight to bed.