On 2017-08-25, Bice wrote:
Near the end for just a second or two I saw little dots of light all
along the right edge of the moon - I'm not sure if that's what's
referred to as Baily's Beads or not.

Yes; yes it is. You were seeing sunlight through the valleys. A Lunar country
& western song!

And then the edge of the sun
came back out and we got the diamond ring effect for a few seconds.

Heh. Did you notice paticularly how much brighter the 'diamond' was than the
ring? Even though a couple moments ago the ring had looked pretty bright?

We only hung around for about 15 minutes after totality ended, because
we stupidly thought we could get a jump on traffic and maybe be back
home in PA by 1 or 2am. I should have realized that half the east
coast would all be trying to drive north on the same highway. It took
us over four hours just to get through the Knoxville, TN area.

.... Huh. Carthage is a little ways north of I-40, but is much closer to
Nashville; were you trying to go back up I-75? Because yeah, that was gonna
be a tire fire from the start. Of course, so would I-65 have been; you might've
done better, in hindsight, to take county/state routes north from Carthage
until you hit I-69.

I was about 30-35 miles southwest of where I live in Knoxville, and it STILL
took me more than four hours to get home.

We finally gave up around midnight in southern Virginia and found what
I think might have been the last hotel room at a Ramada Inn. Back on
the road at 7am the next day and traffic was STILL bad. It took us
over eight hours to drive the last 300 or so miles home, and that was
with using my car's GPS system to route ourselves around a couple more
accidents that had interstate 81 at a standstill.

I estimate maybe 10% of the nation's population had squoze itself into the
totality band, and right afterwards ALL of it tried to escape at once. so yeah.

So, 25+ hours in the car, a couple hundred bucks for hotels, plus food
and gas...all for two and a half minutes of totality. It was totally
worth it.

Check! agreed.

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeableBLINK
my gatekeeper archives are no longer accessible / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.