Question: My wife and I are planning to drive to Las Vegas from Los Angeles for the Thanksgiving weekend. Any advice on how early we need to leave on Sunday to minimize traffic on the return trip? I vote 7:00 or 7:30 a.m., and she thinks that's just too early to get up.

Sean in Upland, Calif.

Since people from all of the country and the world read this, I'm going to open this discussion up to more than just getting back and forth from Los Angeles.

First, I agree with your wife that 7 a.m. is too early to get up, just as a general rule of life. But deciding an exit strategy for Las Vegas is just as important as deciding how to get there in the first place.

Sundays are, as a general rule, the busiest time of the week in terms of people leaving Las Vegas. Throw in a holiday and you have a recipe for disaster, with what should be a four-hour drive to Los Angeles turning into a nine-hour odyssey and what should be a 30-minute check-in and security screening at the airport into lines that stretch seemingly for miles.

If you can swing it, try to leave on Monday morning. You're going to save yourself a lot of time and aggravation. Unfortunately, most people don't have that luxury.

So, when to leave on Sunday?

Based on my personal experience both driving and flying, it seems as if there are two peak times on the roads and in the airports on non-holiday weekends. The first happens early as people like you, Sean, don't listen to reasonable people like your wife and try to "beat the traffic." Thing is, there are a lot of people who think like that, so you have an early morning "rush hour" on the freeways and at the airport. This usually dies down by around 10 or 11 a.m.

The second peak time starts later in the afternoon, usually around 2 p.m.. and escalates from there until late in the evening, with the heaviest time being between 4 and 6 p.m. If you're leaving Las Vegas at around 5 p.m. don't expect to get to Los Angeles much before midnight on busy weekends, and get to the airport at least two hours before your flight to make sure you get through the security lines.

I usually try to leave between 11 a.m. and noon. You might think that since hotel checkout at most places is around that time that people would be heading toward the exits in droves, but in my experience that is not usually the case. The early birds are long gone and the people who want to get as much time in the casino as they possibly can won't be leaving for hours, so there's a bit of a lull.

Now, if we're talking about the end of a holiday weekend, take everything I just said and throw it out the window. There is no such thing as a good time to leave pretty much all day long. For drivers to Los Angeles, I suggest you decide what time you want to be home, subtract eight hours and leave Las Vegas accordingly. If you catch a break and make it home before that, consider it a bonus -- like winning a little something extra on a slot machine.

If it were up to me, Sean, I'd listen to your wife and sleep an extra couple of hours. She sounds like a smart woman.

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