Looking for an excuse not to spend the night at your in-laws, or a way to encourage your guests to hit the road promptly post-pumpkin pie?

The best way to avoid holiday traffic in Maine next week is to travel on Thanksgiving Day. You can tell them I told you.

At its busiest around the holiday last year — between 3 and 4 p.m. on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving — the Maine Turnpike still had fewer cars on it than at the peak of the evening rush on a mundane Monday in May.

Total traffic that day, just over 396,000 cars, was about 6% above average and 21% lower than on a Friday in August, when it’s as bad as it gets, according to the Maine Turnpike Authority.

But even if Thanksgiving traffic isn’t any worse than an average weekday commute, you can still strategize to minimize your time spent in the car.

If you’re able to take off early Wednesday, the turnpike was actually less busy at that time last year than on a normal morning before 9 a.m. Traffic steadily increased throughout the day until 4 p.m., then hovered around the average for the rest of the day.

On Thanksgiving Day, traffic peaked between 11 a.m. and noon but was only slightly above average for that hour and well below it most the rest of the day.

Weather, however, is always a factor, and last year a storm that started as rain Thursday morning and had dusted most of the state with snow by turkey time might have kept some cars off the road.

But the year before, when the worse weather was on Wednesday, the traffic pattern on Thanksgiving Day wasn’t much different. The spike started earlier, at 10 a.m., and between 11 a.m. and noon was nearly as busy as late Wednesday afternoon, but quickly dropped back down after 1 p.m.

This year’s forecast was mostly clear for the days around Thanksgiving as of Tuesday, said Stephen Baron, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, though it was early to make an accurate prediction.

Heading home, Friday is the busiest travel day of the weekend in Maine, with traffic jumping up after 10 a.m. and not dropping down until after 5 p.m. — it’s the same for Saturday and Sunday, though the total count dwindles with each day.

So if your hosts give you a hard time about hitting the road first thing in the morning, tell them it’s that or they have to feed you for two more meals. You’ll quickly find out where you rank relative to their leftovers.