Travel boost
Holiday weekend kicks off ‘unofficial’ start of summer
By Larry Meyer
Argus Observer
Friday, May 22, 2009 12:14 PM PDT
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| Cars make their way off the freeway into the rest area in Idaho perched on the bluff above the Snake River. Holiday travel this weekend is expected to be higher than last year as lower gas prices entice more people to hit the road. |
ONTARIO — With good weather predicted and fuel prices stable many people are hitting the highways for the Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season, while others will still remain home for graduation or other events.
Among the people traveling prior to the weekend were Jack and Barbara Nye, who were planning to stay the night in Boise.
“We came from 15 miles west of Portland,” Barbara Nye said.
They plan to travel on to Fairfield to stay with friends and make a week of it touring the central Idaho area.
“We will visit Sun Valley,” she said.
Fuel prices, which had fallen below $2 per gallon, have showed a modest bounce recently, and the average price in the Ontario area is about $2.30 or higher, compared with more than $3 a gallon last year at this time.
According to a report by the AAA, the last Memorial Day when gas prices were at or near the current level was in 2005.
Karen Cleaver, manager of the Ontario Welcome Center, said Thursday that she believes the holiday traffic is up from last year.
“We’ve had more people coming through,” she said.
However, how numbers will compare with last year will be hard to determine because the Ontario center, and other seasonal welcome centers, opened later because of the state budget problems.
“We were cut by six weeks,” she said.
Popular destinations among travelers are the Oregon coast and the Wallowa Mountains, even though it is still quite cool.
“A lot more Idahoans are going to the Wallowas,” Cleaver said.
People planning to head for mountains should be prepared for the wet and possibly soggy conditions and some closures in the upper country. The Elkhorn Scenic Byway is closed west of Anthony Lake and north for Granite. While the campgrounds in that area are closed, Wallowa-Whitman National Forest officials report that area is open for snowmobiling and there are designated places to park at either end.
Malheur County Sheriff Andy Bentz said traffic was still at normal levels Thursday, but he had noticed a lot of vehicles with boats and trailers behind them, so a lot of people are planning to get out of town. Patrols out of his office would stay at normal levels over the weekend, Bentz said.
While AAA predicts travel will increase across most of the nation, car travel in the mountain region, including Idaho, was expected to decrease, but the percentage of population in the region traveling in cars will be higher.
