My son is seriously considering accepting his offer to UVA. We live in Seattle. Does anyone have experience with travel to/from Charlottesville to the west coast? I assume there are no direct flights. Also do they get the whole week of Thanksgiving off, or just a long weekend?
Direct flights are largely from the eastern third of the country: http://www.gocho.com/routes-stops/
Dulles Airport is a couple of hours away by car and will have many more flight options.
Fellow West Coast HOO here (Los Angeles)~
I always fly into CHO airport from LAX. Usually transfer from either Chicago or Charlotte. CHO’s nice. It recently got a nice interior facelift. I wouldn’t recommend doing the whole fly-in-to-DC-and-drive-down-to-cville. It’s a pain. One transfer isn’t bad. Just fly in to Charlottesville.
Thanksgiving break starts on the Wednesday, but a lot of us peace out on the Monday…and professors sort of expect that, so students take a gratuitous week off LOL
Totally agree with @an77drew. We travel a lot in admission. I happily transfer in Detroit or Chicago because flying out of CHO is such a pleasure. You can go from the curb to your gate in under 5 minutes at certain times of the day. I once saw a CHO staff member wake someone up in the waiting area to tell them their flight was boarding. 
Driving 2 hours to deal with Dulles or 1 hour to deal with RVA isn’t worth it, IMO.
A large number of UVa students live close to Dulles. It should not be hard to find someone to provide a ride back and forth during breaks.
Go on the UVA Parent Network page on FB. There are a bunch of Seattle parents on there.
I live in Ohio, and I have made the trek to so many different airports to get to/from UVA. I’ve carpooled to Baltimore (BWI), taken a bus to Fairfax and then an Uber to Dulles (IAD) and National (DCA), and have taken a taxi from my dorm to CHO. I agree with the posters above, CHO is by far the best option; I’ve never waited for more than three to five minutes in security. Flying from CHO always requires a connection somewhere to get to Cleveland, but my layovers in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Dulles have all been quick and painless. In fact, coming back to UVA from spring break in Seattle, I found a bunch of itineraries like SEA-ORD-CHO that all seemed to be pretty reasonable and easy.
I mostly used Dulles back in the day.
CHO is a nice convenient small airport. But using it vs. Dulles will have the same pros/cons of any small airport.
Direct flights from Dulles will probably be half the price of flights from CHO. Fewer options from CHO. The two hours to drive to Dulles will probably wash with the two hours of extra flight time that gets used up connecting. And the chances of a major travel disaster (weather, equipment, crew issues, missed connections) go up exponentially with connecting vs. direct/drive.
For me, that last one is decisive. I’ll always drive 1-2 hours to avoid connecting. You only wind up sleeping in the terminal when you are doing connecting flights. With maybe one third of UVA students being from NoVa, getting a ride to Dulles is super easy.