Holiday Travelers Benefit From Spread-Out Season
As travelers take to road, air and sky in the sometimes-hectic last days before Christmas, they should keep one thing in mind: It could be worse.
Planes took off into windy but accommodating skies Thursday at New York's LaGuardia Airport as Steve Kent prepared to fly to Denver for a family ski trip, scoffing at the puny lines.
"I don't find it that difficult,'' he said. "I think Thanksgiving is harder.''
Though Christmas and New Year's travel is expected to be up from last year, the spread-out nature of these holidays means things won't be quite so cramped as Thanksgiving, for instance, when practically everyone who's going somewhere is on the move the same day.
"We have a lot of folks who already may have taken off of work,'' said Troy Green, a spokesman for AAA. ``They may have arrived at their destination before today.''
Mike Lukosavich, of Harrison Township, Mich., was surprised the first leg of his trip was moving so smoothly when he stopped at rest area on the Ohio Turnpike in Elmore, Ohio, near Toledo.
He, his wife and their 8-month-old daughter were heading to see family in Parkersburg, W.Va. His only headache came when he saw the gas price of about $3 a gallon.
"It's something you have to do to see the family,'' said Lukosavich, 33.
The AAA has expected overall travel to rise about 3 percent this year, with more than 92 million people planning to go more than 50 miles sometime between now and Jan. 2. More than 90 percent said they would be driving.
The Vino Volo Wine Room at Detroit Metropolitan Airport is benefiting from more travelers, manager Mark Del Duco said Thursday.
The Christmas mood is more there this year than last,'' he said, estimating that sales are up this 10 percent this season compared with last year as financially confident travelers spend more freely.
Helping matters is that the most densely populated parts of the country are getting a break from the weather.
Rains that have been pounding California have stopped. And while a snowstorm is making its way across the country, it's not expected to hit the crowded East Coast until the weekend, when people are settled at their destinations - though it could make for a tricky return trip.
Swaths of the Rocky Mountain region and Midwest expect snow Thursday and Friday, but nothing widely crippling. The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings for parts of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico and advisories for other parts, including an area stretching from Wyoming to Illinois.
Steve Brown, 50, of Elm Creek, Neb., left Tuesday afternoon and drove all night to beat the storm as it worked its way east. Brown, a grain hauler, was taking his two children to see his mother on the Ohio dairy farm where he grew up.
"I had orders to come home or she was going to come get me,'' Brown said during at the Elmore rest area, where adults filled up on coffee while kids, traveling in pajamas, loaded up on Tater Tots.
After record-breaking snow falls in the East and a treacherous Christmas travel season in the nation's midsection last year, the ways weather can mess up travel seem to be on plenty of minds.
At LaGuardia, Mike and Martha Lee Mellis waited to fly to Aspen, Colo., with their three young sons. They dreaded a repeat of last winter's ski trip, when a snowstorm hit while they were transferring in Chicago on their way home.
"We had to return via Philadelphia, and I had to rent a car and drive everybody home at 11 at night,'' Mike Mellis recalled.
His wife had been trying to forget, saying, "I've blocked it all out.''
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
