Where Did All the Vacationers Go?

My friends and I hit traffic only twice on the epic journey from Narragansett, Rhode Island back to Boston yesterday. The first patch was at the split of Rt. 4 and Rt. 1 in Rhode Island, which we deftly avoided by taking back roads. The second time was at the split of 95 and 93.

Maybe the clamcakes and chowder made us hallucinate, but the traffic didn’t seem all that bad.

Yet the Herald reports that things were all backed up coming back from the Cape.

Cars backed up as far as 17 miles along Route 6 on Cape Cod as the first holiday weekend of the unofficial summer season crawled to a close.

The worst traffic crush came in the late afternoon on Cape Cod, when travelers seemed to hit the road all at once[.]

All those cars must have vanished once they hit the Expressway, because things were moving along fine when we rolled through around 6 p.m.

The one thing I did notice was that many of the cars were carrying full loads. Instead of two or three people, many drivers crammed in five or six passengers, presumably to ease the hurt of gas prices. If the quick commute from the South Shore is the silver lining to $4-a-gallon gas, we’ll take it.