The traditional rush for Thanksgiving family gatherings got off to a smooth start yesterday as hundreds of thousands of Marylanders and their kin hit the roads, rails and skies for the long holiday.
At Baltimore-Washington International Airport, a record 200,000 people were expected to come and go by Sunday. And, despite predictions that the crush of travelers would be "a zoo," last evening's peak seemed to be going well.
"I've been here normal business days and waited longer," said Chip Warden, 27, who said he has flown out of BWI 30 to 40 times.
He and his wife, Dianna, and their two children left Conowingo three hours before their flight to Nashville, Tenn., where they are celebrating Thanksgiving with her parents. They gave dTC themselves plenty of time to allow for "a long line and bad traffic and all," he explained.
"It didn't happen," said Mr. Warden, who left the crowd at the gate about 5:45 p.m. to change the diapers of his 2-year-old son, Chase.
Airport officials said they were prepared for the rush.
"It's very busy, but there are not extremely long lines," airport spokeswoman Linda Green said yesterday afternoon.
The airport's 5,400-space main satellite parking lot was full by noon yesterday, and travelers were waved off to 3,300 more spaces in three overflow lots, one of them just opened for this holiday rush. In all, the airport has more than 15,000 parking spaces.
"Several airlines reported yesterday they were extremely busy with heavy loads going out," Ms. Green said.
One sign that a holiday loomed was the flood of midshipmen eager to get home. Aleksei Razsadin, 18, left Annapolis in style. He and five other midshipmen rented a white, stretch limousine for the ride to the airport. Mr. Razsadin is making his first trip to Los Angeles.
"We just basically got out of the academy as quick as we can," he said. "I'm kind of impatient."
Some people have put off their trips until today. The airlines have offered special promotional fares to get more people to fly on Thanksgiving Day. It seems to be working.
Likewise, said Ms. Green, more people are beginning to fly back from their holiday visits on Friday, making that day busier at BWI than it used to be.
At Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore, train travel was "steady," said Ken Wiedel, general supervisor of customer service. "It's a little bit heavier than last year, but not a major crunch."
Mr. Wiedel said about 6,000 passengers, twice as many as on a normal day, were expected yesterday and Sunday.
Amtrak had scheduled many extra trains to handle yesterday's pre-Thanksgiving crush.
Earlier yesterday, the Greyhound Bus Terminal was much more crowded than was Penn Station. But Eloise Schmaus, a clerk for 42 years, first with Trailways and then Greyhound, said the terminal wasn't nearly as busy as it would be by evening. "You come back then and you'll have to swim through this crowd," she said.
Still, Greyhound officials were expecting smaller crowds than in past years because of the airfare wars.
Pete Van Brummelen and his wife, Myrtle, sat glumly in the restaurant at the terminal nursing coffee and cheese-steak sandwiches, staring out the big window onto Fayette Street and contemplating Thanksgiving plans that had gone awry. While waiting -- impatiently -- for their 7 p.m. bus to Newark, N.J., they had watched a man being handcuffed and hauled away by police.
"It's certainly different," Mr. Van Brummelen, a friendly, bearded truck operator, said diplomatically.
The Van Brummelens had been on their way to a Thanksgiving celebration in Syracuse with her mother, ("My first Thanksgiving in 20 years with my mother," she said. )
But their truck broke down in Baltimore Monday. A garage was unable to repair it, forcing the Van Brummelens to head yesterday for New Jersey to borrow another truck. After that, they would have to head back home to Lakeland, Fla. Thanksgiving in Syracuse was out.
In a lounge nearby, Leona Lloyd and Gene Hardy were commiserating over their pre-Thanksgiving travel. Strangers at the beginning of the day in Pennsylvania where they had both boarded a bus to Baltimore, they were now practically a support group for angry bus riders.
"I stood in line for 45 minutes just to find out when was the next bus to Silver Spring," said Ms. Lloyd, a nurse from Bristol, Pa.
She and Mr. Hardy, who was also headed for Silver Spring, discovered that they had a layover of nearly three hours in the crowded, hot terminal.
"When you have to wait half a day, that doesn't make any sense," said Mr. Hardy, a retired custodian from Camden, N.J. "Where we're going is only an hour away. I'd hate to be going to Texas."
Travelers were not immediately inconvenienced by light snow that had sprinkled much of the metropolitan area by 9 p.m. Accumulations of up to 1 inch were reported on roads in Frederick County.
On the highways, state police said, more than 121,000 vehicles were expected to travel Interstate 95 between the city line and Delaware in the 24 hours ending last midnight. That compares with 55,000 on a typical Wednesday, said Lori Vidil, spokeswoman for the Maryland Transportation Administration.
Cpl. Michael Gavel watched "big, ugly snowflakes" falling outside the toll plaza at the Susquehanna River at 7:45 p.m. He said the wet roads, stop-and-go traffic and impatient drivers had caused 10 fender-benders since 3 p.m.
But the traffic was not as heavy as anticipated.
"We expected wall to wall and haven't got it yet," Corporal Gavel said.
Maryland Toll Facilities Police expected 3 percent more highway traffic than last Thanksgiving.
The Fort McHenry Tunnel was projected to handle more than 142,000 vehicles yesterday, compared with 90,000 on the average weekday.