A friend was flying out of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on Tuesday, heading for the Midwest to spend Thanksgiving with family.

Her plan was to use long-term parking, but she knew that it might take a while to find a space and for the shuttle bus to find her and her luggage to get to the terminal. Then there was the security lines and the fact that it was Thanksgiving week and on and on. She decided to arrive at the airport a full four hours early. Frankly, the math seemed to make some sense.

Boy, was she wrong.

On the way to the airport, one of the roads she takes through the backwoods was blocked for an extended period of time by a crash. From where she was, there weren’t any good alternatives, so she waited it out and ended up getting onto the airport property an hour later than she planned.

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Pulling into one of the long-term lots, she then started the search for a space that she assumed would be harder to find than hen’s teeth (a stupid countrified expression but nevertheless) and found one within five minutes. The shuttle for the terminal actually followed her to the space, so the lag time there was nonexistent.

She arrived at the terminal a full three hours before the scheduled departure time but still had to check her luggage and then endure the line for the security checkpoint.

Five people stood between her and the automated check-in machine; one of the airline employees was right there to assist her with her big suitcase and sent it on its way. Total time: seven minutes. But there was still the issue of the security checkpoint. Certainly that was going to ruin what was becoming a pretty good trip.

Someone in security checkpoint heaven must have been smiling down on her, because there were only a dozen or so people ahead of her at the check-the-ID, remove-the-shoes and put-the-bag-and-the-laptop-on-the-conveyor-belt line. The Transportation Security Administration couldn’t have made the line move faster if there had been television cameras there to document the holiday getaway.

Yes, her gate was still half a mile away and the line at the coffee counter was a bit longer than one might like, but ... the worst part of it all was that she now had 2 1/2 hours to wait for the plane to board and the battery in her cell phone was dying.

All in all, it was a pretty good experience.

I hope that those of you who are traveling this holiday weekend have half as much good fortune as did my friend and that your holiday is wonderful. We all have things to be thankful for; whether it’s a short line when we expected a long one or just the smiles on the faces of those we love when we finally get to where we are going this Thanksgiving.