More holiday travelers hit the road this Christmas to avoid travel delays
SACRAMENTO — Some holiday travelers were gassing up and hitting the road extra late Friday to miss as much traffic as possible.
Grandpa Brucen Ullon packed all the presents inside duct taped containers in the back of his truck. His silver sleigh was ready to ride from Georgetown to the San Francisco Bay Area.
"It's going to take about two hours and thirty minutes," he said.
Ullon is one of the 102 million Americans expected to drive to their holiday destinations this year — that's 2 million more than a year ago.
At the Sacramento International Airport (SMF), Maria Vasquez and her husband's trip was first delayed, then canceled.
"Our flight got delayed and so they told us to come a little later, which we did, and then we got here and then they told us that we couldn't make our connecting flight from Sacramento to Las Vegas and from Las Vegas to Omaha," she said.
Accorning to FlightAware, 37 flights were canceled and 76 were delayed out of SMF on Friday, mostly due to extreme weather across the country.
AAA reports that while travel is up this year by ground and air, it still has not reached 2019 pre-pandemic levels.