Rob PegoraroThankful for uneventful Thanksgiving travel
Another year of Thanksgiving travel is in the books, and this year’s edition of it somehow happened without any flight cancellations, interruptions or even delays. That feels like even more of a miracle than the phrase “no delays” might suggest, because 2025 has been such a snakebit year for air travel.
It started with the horrifying news of an almost 16-year streak of zero fatal crashes among U.S. airlines ending a few miles from my house, went on to feature months of meltdown-level disruptions among flights in and out of Newark that by summer had sent EWR to the bottom of my list of United hub airports, and then it left already-stressed air-traffic control employees working for more than a month without pay courtesy of the government shutdown.
But after all that, Wednesday’s JetBlue flight from National Airport to Boston arrived at the gate at BOS six minutes early, after which Saturday’s United nonstop from Boston to Dulles reached its gate exactly on time. Service was great on each flight, the WiFi worked fine, and even the planes were above average: a four-year-old Airbus A220 on the flight up, a renewed Boeing 737 with screens at every seat on the way home.
The experience feels even more like winning a lottery ticket considering some of the miserable Thanksgiving travel experiences I’ve had in the past. I’m thinking about when coming home for the holiday meant a long drive interrupted by Breezewood, Penn.; the subsequent years when a theoretically short drive to a suburb of Philadelphia could become a three-hour slog; most of all, the decade and change when the Thanksgiving journey either involved taking Amtrak and then two NJ Transit trains or spending four-plus hours on I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike that could easily stretch past six hours on the roads.
(It’s kind of crazy that I have hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my own abode only twice since leaving for college: Everybody visited us in 2019 for a change, and then the pandemic put a family reunion out of the question the next year.)
Now that my mother and my brother and his family all live in the same town just north of Boston, I just have to deal with spending money, not time. But as expensive as Thanksgiving flights can be, they beat the absurdity of driving 450 miles and change on the busiest travel weekend of the year. Bonus: The flights, even if I chance a connection, are so short that I can bring a container of frozen pumpkin puree in my carry-on luggage and not worry about that pie ingredient melting before I’ve reached family.
I’m thankful for having this part of holiday travel easier than it used to be. And I’m thankful, as ever, for everybody connected with the travel industry who worked this holiday so that the rest of us could travel for it.
#amtrak #bos #boston #dca #flightDelays #holidayTravel #i95 #iad #jerseyTurnpike #jetblue #thanksgiving #thanksgivingTravel #united
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