Day Before Holiday, Travelers Are Fed Up With Traffic

That included gas stations and fast-food restaurants flanking I-95, where parking lots soon filled up with vehicles with out-of-state license plates. Strangers exchanged advice on alternative routes, bonding over their collective misery. Others had a more immediate priority:

"I had to go to the bathroom quite badly," said Skip McPherson, 51, a painting contractor from Gladstone, N.J., who made a pit stop at a McDonald's.

He was traveling with his wife, Cheryl, their Shetland sheepdog, a yellow Lab and four cats. They left their house at 2:45 a.m. yesterday to visit his mother in Reedville, Va. They had seen signs flashing along the highway, warning of the congestion.

"But no one was paying attention," Skip McPherson said.

They did pay attention when other drivers, succumbing to pent-up frustration, began passing on the left and right shoulders in a desperate, if futile, attempt to make progress.

"People were driving like animals," Cheryl McPherson said. "It was too unsafe."

After a mere hour in the snarled traffic, Jeffrey Warley was ready to beat himself up for not leaving the Bronx earlier yesterday. He left at 3 a.m.

Six hours later, he sat in the McDonald's with his brother and two children -- not at his grandmother's house in South Carolina -- wishing they had left at an even more ungodly hour.

"I'm really kicking myself," said Warley, 39, who works for Nielsen Media Research. "I was saying we should leave at one in the morning, but we wanted to get some more rest."

The traffic was so thick it was enough to make Carlos Rodriguez, a truck driver from Mexico, wonder whether he had mistakenly driven into a Third World country.

"This is the United States," he muttered, staring into the line of cars that stretched toward the horizon. "This should have been cleared by now."

His day will be long, he said. The traffic had delayed his shipment of appliances to stores across Prince George's County by at least two hours.