On Thanksgiving Day, Washington can feel more like a ghost town than a hometown.
Nearly 1 million people — more than 16 percent of the region’s population — were expected to scatter for the holiday, according to estimates from AAA Mid-Atlantic.
Kevin Schwalb will be thankful if he can just field a football team as his neighbors head off to Grandma’s house.
“We won’t have many substitutes,” said the suburban Alexandria resident struggling to organize a Thanksgiving game with his neighborhood dads club.
“I’ve got about 50 percent of my guys here and playing, and 50 percent going away,” Schwalb said, adding that he’s grateful, at least, that a couple of the neighborhood jocks are staying in town, and several have brothers and brothers-in-law to fill out the feeble squads.
“I’m just trying to make it feel like home,” he said.
Northwest D.C. resident Jason Langsner and his friends canceled a weekly trivia night at Georgetown’s Mad Hatter pub on Tuesday because too many were headed out of the city.
“Everyone’s going,” he said. “I think I have one friend whose parents actually flew in here.”
Langsner jumped a crowded train New Jersey-bound Wednesday afternoon to spend the holiday with his family.
Such is the lot of one of the country’s most transient cities. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, more than 8 percent of D.C. residents lived elsewhere than the District just one year earlier. In Fairfax, more than 7 percent hailed from a different county, and in Montgomery, more than 5 percent did.
Compare those figures with other locales reputed for a constant stream of residents. Less than 4 percent of New Yorkers lived elsewhere one year earlier. Only about 3 percent of Chicagoans were outside of the Windy City, and in Los Angeles, only 2 percent.
Amtrak predicted that Wednesday would be its heaviest travel day of the year, with ridership as high as 125,000 passengers. On a typical Wednesday, ridership is around 75,000, Amtrak officials said.
And despite gas costing 60 cents more per gallon than at the same time last year, the number of Washingtonians headed outbound is expected to grow by nearly 4 percent, compared with barely a 1 percent increase nationwide, according to AAA.
Virginia and Maryland called off construction and lane closures for the long weekend to ease the floods in and out of the city.
But not everyone will mourn the absence of their fair-weather neighbors.
“It’s definitely a ghost town on Thanksgiving, but we’ll enjoy the quiet,” said Nick Wineriter, a 37-year-old bartender who lives in Rockville and has no plans to travel.
Jarad Slipp, restaurant director at D.C.’s chic CityZen restaurant, will prepare a Thanksgiving meal so that his chef friends, including CityZen’s Eric Ziebold, can enjoy a rare day out of the kitchen, said his wife, Anna McCollister-Slipp. The entree will include turkey breasts “sous-vide,” which is essentially chicken-in-a-bag suitable for a top-notch chef.
“We’re a spot for the restaurant refugees,” she said. “Restaurant people can’t get away, so they show up here to relax.”
