HARTLAND — As with many things in life, watching Monday’s solar eclipse was as much about the journey as it was the end result.

Given that thousands of people spent hours on congested Vermont highways in their cars crawling to and back from their destination north to watch the event, a positive attitude helped to dispel what they might have otherwise found a frustrating ordeal.

“There were a couple of aggravating moments but the fact that we were able to successfully evade (Interstate 91) turned it into a driving adventure and a little bit of a game, like solving a puzzle,” said Becka Warren, of Hartland. Warren, with her husband and son, sought to avoid the bumper-to-bumper highway traffic and — with an old-school Gazetteer in hand — stitched together a route over Vermont back roads to get home.

It took Warren and her family two hours to drive on Monday morning from their home in Hartland to a friend’s house in Holland, Vt., near the Canadian border where they watched the eclipse. But it took a full five hours on the return journey that afternoon and evening as they decided to take back roads, hoping to avoid congestion along I-91 that turned the usually sparsely traveled highway into a creeping motorcade.

Turns out, however, a lot of other travelers had the same idea and the back roads were thick with vehicles, too, leading the Warren family to hop, skip, detour and vector their way south.

“We thought it was going to be clear, but then (traffic) would totally back up. We’d go in one direction for a little bit, get clogged up, pull a turn and go back the way we came and then find a different way,” Warren said. “Until we got down to Woodsville, any road that had a number was congested.”

On Tuesday, Vermont Agency of Transportation officials said they were still compiling and analyzing traffic data to estimate how many motor vehicles flooded into the state traveling to a destination that was in the dark path of 100% “totality.”

They said figures would not likely be tabulated until Gov. Phil Scott holds a press conference on Wednesday morning.

One group that profitably benefited from the invasion of eclipsotourism into Vermont are the operators of gas stations and convenience stores that dot most of the interstate exits up and down and across the state.

“I wish I got a dollar for every bathroom toilet flush,” joked Tom Frawley, chief executive of Summit Distributing, owner of 18 fuel and convenience stores in Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts — including The Station in White River Junction at the Sykes Mountain Avenue roundabout and The Barn in Randolph off Exit 4 on I-89.

That was hardly necessary, however, as Frawley described the surge in customers as leading to “probably the best Monday as far back as I can ever remember,” with “30-plus percent sales increases across the whole group of stations that were close to I-91 and I-89.”

He likened the level of Monday’s business at Summit’s Vermont locations to a “perfect-weather July 4th.”

”Fortunately, we didn’t have any run-out situations but we got very close,” Frawley said, explaining that Summit braced for the influx by making sure “we got all our deliveries in overnight to have everything stocked to the max.”

Skip Vallee, owner of the St. Albans, Vt.-based Maplefields convenience store and gas station chain, said via email on Tuesday that Monday’s gas sales were “only up moderately” which he attributed to “day trippers from the south probably filling up before they came” into Vermont. But convenience store sales — he said after checking the overnight reports that came in — “were two or three times normal,” adding he wanted to give a shoutout “to thank all our associates for their great efforts in making the experience of our customers a good one.”

Despite the high traffic volume, Vermont State Police reported only a handful of DUI arrests on Monday and Tuesday, including three conducted out of the Royalton barracks. Two of those involved out-of-state drivers, one, a 42-year-old woman from East Lyme, Conn., was arrested and charged with DUI and reckless endangerment after she was allegedly driving south on I-89 North in Royalton.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, travelers were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the northern part of the state through at least 2 a.m. on Tuesday, clogging up I-93 South along which traffic was backed up in parts of Maine for several hours.

New England’s clear skies and mild weather on Monday made for ideal viewing conditions for “totality.” In New Hampshire, people flocked to places such as Lancaster, Stewartstown, Colebrook and Pittsburg, near the Canadian border.

But the roads were swarmed on the trip back, too, and traffic came to a standstill in some areas.

“People were just pulling over on the side of the road going to the bathroom, people were pulling over to shut their cars off, sleeping in their cars all over (U.S.) Route 3,” said Scott Lacourse, who left his vacation home in Pittsburg with his wife and their two dogs at 6:30 p.m. They got home to Londonderry, N.H., nine hours later.

“Every rest area, any pull-off, anything, was full,” Lacourse said, adding that there also was no cell service.

Some like Warren used paper maps to navigate home through back roads. Others were running out of gas, and some broke down. Som e people opted for the dangerous maneuver of driving across a median ditch and turning back onto northbound lanes. At least one car got stuck in the ditch. Some people who tried to stop for fast food along the way were met by a long line and the realization that the staff had stopped taking orders.

Lacourse and his wife, Sirena Holobinko Bogdahn, thought that if they left later in the day traffic would be cleared, but that wasn’t the case.

In spite of that, “it was well worth it,” she said of the eclipse viewing. “It was so amazing.”

John Martin, who was visiting from Massachusetts, described it as a “creep and a crawl” near Franconia, where Route 3 feeds into the Franconia Notch Parkway, a one-lane mountain pass in each direction, before expanding into the multilane interstate.

“You’re looking at your GPS trying to get off of 93 to find something a little quicker, and everybody else was thinking the same thing,” he told WMUR-TV.

New Hampshire state officials had warned travelers that the return could be slow going and encouraged people to stay for a while.

“To our friends visiting from out of state, remember: there’s no sales tax in N.H., so feel free to stay a bit longer!” Gov. Chris Sununu trumpeted on Friday.

John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@ v n e ws.com. Associated Press contributed to this story.