Salisbury for the Weekend

Yesterday afternoon, I joined the thousands of other DC residents in heading to their holiday destination for the weekend, leaving at the beginning of rush hour. The plan was to leave the house at 4, and meet up with Lauren somewhere along the way as she could not get out of work until after 4:30. On any normal day, leaving at 4 would have left me plenty of time to meet Lauren on the other side of DC on Rt. 50. However, after taking one look at trafficland.com, and another look at my WeatherBug, I decided to get a jump start and leave 15 minutes earlier.

I pulled out of my driveway in Del Ray, Alexandria at 3:45 and proceeded to sit on the 14th Street Bridge for about 30 minutes, and then slowly crawled through DC to 295, and 1 hour and 15 minutes later, emerged on to Rt 50. A trip that normally takes 20 minutes took an extra 55 minutes. To put it into perspective, Lauren left work at 5 (about 10 miles away), I left at 3:45, and she still ended up ahead of me on 50. When I finally emerged on 50, it was raining so hard, you could barely see more than 15 feet ahead of you AND people were driving like absolute maniacs! Between the rain and traffic, it was a horrible ride, one that I only endured because we had a wonderful dinner awaiting us in Ocean City. That, and I had some great holiday music to listen to... Four hours later, we made it in one piece and had a fantastic dinner with all of Lauren's family.

What was the lesson learned? If you can avoid it, do not leave for the holidays during rush hour traffic on the last work day before the holiday. This year it could not be avoided, but my hope is that next year will be a little different. Just thought I would share my exciting adventures with all of you.