Long weekend. Yes. Hills packed. Also, yes.As soon as a long weekend arrives, you can almost predict the traffic updates from Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Mahabaleshwar – almost every place you can go for a quick break. Uttarakhand is packed. Himachal is packed, with travellers heading to Manali for a short holiday. A visit to Atal Tunnel and the jams there have become a regular phenomenon during long weekends. Kainchi Dham, too, is seeing a surge of travellers, with the place becoming increasingly popular and traffic piling up on the roads leading there after the release of the film – Hanuman Ansh.And this is not just anecdotal. The numbers show that Indians are travelling more and making the most of every long weekend.Scapia’s booking data shows that the Gandhi Jayanti break has turned into one of the biggest travel moments of the year, with Indians heading to beaches, temples and new corners of Southeast Asia. People are travelling more as couples, choosing better stays, while women and Gen Z are increasingly setting the pace.Goa continues to be India’s favourite long-weekend escape, leading leisure bookings across buses, flights and hotels. Its share of hotel bookings has risen from 6.6% to 9.3% over last year.Heritage and hill destinations are also seeing strong demand, with Udaipur, Jaipur and Mussoorie among the most booked. Udaipur’s share of hotel bookings has doubled compared with last year.Then there is spiritual travel. Varanasi has entered the top 10 hotel destinations, with its share growing fivefold, while Ujjain, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Tirupati, Katra, Madurai and Amritsar are all drawing more travellers across trains, buses, flights and hotels.As per Pickyourtrail, most trips run for around 4-5 nights, with travellers using leave days to stretch their long weekends. Some are going up to six nights. Bengaluru and Chennai are among the strongest source markets for October international bookings, reflecting the demand for short-haul getaways from India’s major urban and technology-driven hubs.So, clearly, Indians want to travel. And honestly, I am not against that idea. Go out, travel as much as you want.But how do you enjoy a holiday when you can’t reach your destination?The distance from Haldwani to Kainchi Dham is approximately 50 km, and as mentioned in one of the tweets doing the rounds, the journey is taking close to five hours. Manali’s Mall Road is packed with cars from NCR. Hotels in Nainital can be four times more expensive during these periods.This is also a relatively new phenomenon for us. The pandemic changed the way people looked at travel. There was a backlog of not travelling, and once restrictions lifted, people didn’t want to miss an opportunity to get out.Today, not everyone can take 10 days off for a holiday. So, we have found another way. Three days become four. Four become five. A long weekend becomes the perfect excuse to leave the city.And the willingness to travel is clearly there. More than two-thirds (71%) of Indian travellers say they don’t need a reason to book a trip, while almost a third (31%) say they would go to a dream destination without waiting for a milestone to make it worthy, according to Booking.com.Maybe that is the best thing that has happened to travel – we no longer need an occasion to travel.But maybe we also need to rethink when we travel. Because the point of going to the hills is to come back with some fresh air, a slower morning, a long walk and a little bit of quiet.Not five hours of traffic for 50 km. Not paying four times extra hotel prices. Not spending half your holiday looking at the car ahead of you.So yes, don’t wait for a reason to travel. Just don’t wait for a long weekend either.Travel, if you can, when the roads are quieter, the hotels are relatively vacant, and you can actually experience the place you travelled so far to see.You go to the hills for a break. It would be nice if the journey felt like that too!