12/21/06 Holiday Travel Weather

Holiday travel weather. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. (Music) A lot of people will be traveling around the northwest this weekend and into early next week for the Christmas holiday. Janet Ray with AAA says that the roads will be even busier than usual. RAY: AAA is expecting that more people are going to be traveling this holiday season than ever before. In fact we're anticipating a little bit more than a 2% increase in travel this year as compared to last year and last year was an increase over the year before so we certainly have seen a continued trend up for people deciding to travel more than 50 miles from home during the holidays. According to Ray, higher prices aren't stopping people from getting out. RAY: You know it's interesting. Gas prices are higher, hotel prices, even airline fares are a little bit higher this year than last year and yet people find that it's still really important and valuable for them to travel during the holidays whether it's to go on vacation, whether it's to see family and friends; and so they just find a place for that in their budget. West coast gas prices continue to be higher than the national average and Ray says that's not going to change. RAY: We certainly know that a portion of the reason is because we have less supply available within our region, although we have refineries here in Washington state and there's refineries in California, there 's just not the multitude and the competition that we see in the rest of the country and unfortunately that allows those prices to stay high. For those hitting the roads this weekend John Bonk with the National Weather Service in Pendleton has the holiday outlook. BONK: Right now we're looking at a pretty unsettled weather pattern for the weekend. It looks like we're mostly going to consist of chances of snow at this point for the higher elevations, possibly getting down towards the passes Sunday. More of the lowlands unfortunately don't look like a good chance of a white Christmas, even a good dusting. At this point we're still looking for rain at the lower elevations with snow occurring again possibly down to the mountain passes Friday. More like on Saturday night and Sunday and then again a little bit lesser chance on Monday. But at this point I think people need to keep an eye out for updated forecasts as the situation becomes a little bit more clear. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.