Liquor stores in the DC area will be least crowded at 10 PM on Tuesday and most crowded at 7 PM on Wednesday. This, and a collection of other data-based facts about the holiday, can be found in Google Maps’ annual Thanksgiving post. Other items of interest:
• Via Google’s interactive traffic site, the best time to leave the DC area is 2 AM on Wednesday. The worst time is 3 PM on Wednesday. The best time to leave on Friday is 3 AM. The worst time to leave is Friday at 3 PM. Sunday is terrible. Don’t leave on Sunday unless you can get on the road by 6 AM.
• Grocery stores will be packed between 5 and 6 PM on Wednesday. This is a bad time to go to the grocery store. If you go to a grocery store at 10 PM on Tuesday, you will fly through the aisles like Ron Weasley hopped up on Liquid Luck.
• The DC area’s top trending restaurants during Thanksgiving week are Sababa, Cava, and Alfa PieHouse. Its top trending attractions are the National Christmas Tree, the Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of African Art.
• Wednesday at 1 PM is a bad time to go to a bakery. In fact, if you’re doing errands on Wednesday, perhaps you should spend some of your time in long lines engaging in somber reflection about why you find yourself in this situation year after year, even though you have all this data from Google to help you. Get there at 8 AM Thursday and let’s never talk about this again.
• Do you need Google to tell you that movie theaters are going to be very crowded Wednesday and Friday at 6 PM? How have you gotten this far in life? Get to the movie theater at 11 AM on Tuesday, or stay home and watch some The Casketeers on Netflix.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
