Avoiding the purgatory that is Interstate 95 on a holiday weekend is not all that difficult if you're heading from Baltimore to the Northeast. Pennsylvania offers a wide choice of routes to scoot to the west of Philadelphia and invade New Jersey.
Going south is more difficult.
There aren't that many great options when you're heading to Richmond or beyond at peak travel times.
The obvious route is to take the Capital Beltway to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and follow I-95 south. But I-95 in Northern Virginia frequently makes the New Jersey Turnpike look like a quiet country road. The stretch between the Capital Beltway and Fredericksburg, Va., often notches the highest traffic jam ratings south of metropolitan New York on the useful traffic.com Web site.
There is an alternative that avoids the core of the Washington area and brings the motorist back to I-95 on the far side of the most congested stretch. It's U.S. 301 through Southern Maryland - a route I tried out on the day before Thanksgiving to test whether it offers a viable alternative for the holiday traveler.
U.S. 301 is a road familiar to earlier generations of American travelers. From the opening of a bridge over the Potomac River in 1940 until the completion of Interstate 95 between Washington and Richmond in the mid-1960s, 301 was the best way to get from the Northeast to Florida and other southern destinations. (It was also known as Sin Strip, because it led through a part of Maryland known as Little Vegas for its legal gambling and accompanying vice.)
So does this route offer anything for today's traveler? I wasn't sure - not just because the suburban sprawl but because of worries that the two-lane Gov. Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge would be a significant bottleneck.
When I set out Wednesday, it was 2:27 p.m. at St. Paul and Monument streets, and my Garmin GPS system was predicting arrival at Dahlgren, Va., just across the Potomac from Maryland, at 3:56 p.m.
Now GPS is a wonderful invention, but the poor devices are utterly clueless about traffic. In a way that makes them useful because you can get a measure of how much time you're losing to congestion.
Anyway, the GPS system set a course for the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to the Beltway to Interstate 97. So far, so good. But where Route 3 (Crain Highway) splits off, it made a questionable call - directing me to leave I-97 to take advantage of the straight shot to 301. Dennis Starkey of Highlandtown later told me that I should have stayed on 97 to U.S. 50. He said you can more than make up the extra seven miles by avoiding the constant succession of lights on 3 through Crofton. He's right.
