Let’s get the Hell out of here! Via Shutterstock.

Over 40 percent of people in our area are preparing to flee — because of the holidays!

AAA estimates that 41.2 percent of the Washington area’s population will leave town in the coming week.

All told, 2,354,000 people [out of 5,860,342] in the Washington metro area will journey 50 miles or more from home for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the AAA Leisure Travel Index reveals. Now that’s a smidgen of an increase of 0.1 percent from the 2,351,500 people who traveled last year. Yet this upward trend marks the fifth consecutive year of such increases and it is the highest travel volume recorded for the season in the Washington metro area, explains the leisure travel organization.

The vast majority of those travelers, 91 percent, are expected to escape in a vehicle, while 5 percent will fly in an airplane and 4 percent will use other modes of travel.

“Unfortunately, a number of Washingtonians sat out three of the first four holiday travel periods of the year as an upshot of all the political drama in the nation’s capital and the economic stress it engendered. But they will not be denied nor deny themselves or their families during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday travel period,” John B. Townsend II, AAA Mid-Atlantic’s manager of public and government affairs, said dramatically in a release. “Compensating for this, they will go home for Christmas, and not in their dreams. Craving days of solace and tidings of comfort and joy from family and friends, they will kiss Washington, D.C. goodbye in their rear-view mirrors or from their airplane windows.”