ANYTHING & EVERYTHING 1.0: each year's busiest travel days

daylight savings time for this year

I don't usually think about anything longer than a month in advance that isn't already scheduled, but when you have a week off once during the spring, another long weekend a month or so later, and 3 1/2 months off between mid-May and Labor Day, as I will this year, you might as well take advantage of those opportunities! Unfortunately, not all employers tend to be so flexible with offering vacation days to their employees… Case in point: the U.S.P.S., which allows its employees to take certain weeks out of each year, but with 1 important catch: once somebody takes a week, it's 100% taken, unless, that is, the employee who takes a certain week decides to change their week for another week that they suddenly decide will be more convenient for them in the long run! That is the situation I'm facing right now, with the following weeks and long weekends off this semester, &, as of right now, nothing scheduled for me between 5/15/14 (the end of this semester) & 9/3/14 (the beginning of the 2014-15 academic year)! USA TODAY recently (& by that, I mean "recently" as in "date unknown") ran an article on the "top 10 worst travel days", and after checking all the information it could find, figured that the following days are the worst, travel-wise:

(http://traveltips.usatoday.com/top-10-worst-travel-days-106014.html)

1) Thanksgiving weekend, including Thanksgiving Eve

2) Fridays in the summer months (June, July, & August)

3) Christmas and New Year's, plus the few days before & after

4) the week of Independence Day (the irony… I'm working with somebody from EF-Education First right now on a trip that departs that week for Japan!)

5) Memorial Day weekend, A.K.A. "the unofficial start of summer"

6) spring break, which, for some of you with K-12 or college age students, might fall anywhere the beginning of March, to sometime in April, even perhaps sometime in May!

7) New Year's, which I mentioned alongside Christmas

8) Labor Day weekend, A.K.A., "the unofficial end of summer"

9) Easter, which falls in mid-April this year

10) Mardi Gras (an unofficial holiday), which the USA TODAY article calls "spring break for grown-ups"