Jerry Jansen put Sunday's traffic situation into perspective. The roads were so crowded when he stopped at a rest area off Interstate 77 at the Virginia-North Carolina border, there was a line for the men's room.

"That's terrible," the 57-year-old exclaimed as he fueled up Sunday in Daleville, en route from North Carolina to Baltimore. "You never have a line for the men's room."

It's all part of the experience of traveling the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which has some of the year's heaviest traffic.

While the day before Thanksgiving is starting to become the year's most-traveled, Sunday is still the traditional "madhouse day," said Chuck Lionberger, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation in Salem.

"You'll see elevated [traffic] levels at Christmas," he said. "But Thanksgiving is a big winner of holiday travel."

Sunday's traffic volumes on Interstate 81 were expected to climb 40 percent to 50 percent higher than normal, Lionberger said. While 58,000 vehicles might travel Interstate 581 at Peters Creek Road on a normal weekend day, Lionberger predicted Sunday's tally at the intersection would reach 78,000 to 80,000.

As the noontime flow heading south on I-81 backed up in long stretches near Exit 150B in Daleville, even out-of-towners could tell the highway was busier than normal.

At a Pilot gas station, where the air was thick with the smell of fuel and exhaust, Richard Musiello said his journey from North Carolina to Massachusetts became marked with stop-and-go traffic.

"All of a sudden, traffic's gotten heavier and people are acting weird," he said while fueling up his maroon Ford Escape. "I hate that."

Taking a break from the road at the same Daleville gas station, Tom and Deb Nelson -- a married truck-driving couple in their 40s -- contemplated why it is so hard to conquer traffic the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

"People are not paying attention to what's happening on the highway," said Tom Nelson, who travels cross-country with his wife carrying lumber and steel for Steelman Transportation in Missouri. "It's the holidays. They're talking to their families on their cellphones. ... It's a major safety hazard."

Travelers, with or without their cellphones, were easy to spot at the gas stations. They waited in line for fuel in campers and sport utility vehicles bearing license plates from New York to Florida. Passengers piled in the front while luggage, dogs and pillows occupied the back. While stopping for gas, many travelers cleared their vehicles of fast-food soda cups and empty food wrappers.

A day of traffic obstacles awaited them.

In the early evening, state police still expected to be "quite busy" clearing traffic accidents along Southwest Virginia roads, said Trooper Todd Rosenbaum.

"Traffic is stopping and starting very frequently," Rosenbaum said. "People get complacent, just look elsewhere, and hit the car in front of them."

By 1:30 p.m., there were several fender-benders along I-81 in Roanoke, Botetourt and Montgomery counties, according to state police. During the course of the day, police also reported, tractor-trailers in both Roanoke and Wythe counties ran into the median, further backing up traffic.

Northbound on I-81 that morning, the Nelsons' tractor-trailer had to halt quickly.

"Everyone on [U.S.] 460 was merging onto 81, and I don't know what happened -- it was a dead stop," said Deb Nelson.

The couple had been on the road since Saturday night. They had driven from Mississippi and encountered bad traffic in Tennessee and Virginia on their way to Connecticut, they said.

Post-Thanksgiving travel has a marked pattern every year, all over the country, Deb Nelson said; in order to maximize their stay, people leave their relatives' houses only on Sunday, and there's a "mad rush" to get home in time for work the next day.

"That's always when we're driving home," Stafford resident Trip Ward said, rolling his eyes.

Ward, 37, said he stopped at the Daleville gas station with his wife and three children on his way home after visiting family in Roanoke.

The Wards usually set off at 3 p.m. the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which adds at least an extra hour to their trip, he said. This time, they decided to leave early, and were on the road by 11:30 a.m. in an attempt to avoid the heavy traffic.

But that might not have been early enough: Sunday's peak travel hours were expected to be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Keeping that in mind, Robin Pataro left New York at 2 a.m. Sunday to drive home to Tennessee.

"We wanted to be home," she said during a stop for gas.

Meanwhile, as he buckled 2-year-old son Coy into his car seat after a pit stop, Joel Connell of Woodbridge said his job with the military kept the family in Italy for the past three Thanksgivings.

So while the Connells encountered heavy traffic coming from North Carolina, it was a fair trade-off: The holiday was "the first time we had a chance to spend time with family," he said.