On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 01:46:18 -0000 (UTC), D B Davis
wrote:

At twenty minutes until totality it was finally time to stop watching
space.tv's live stream and make that five minute walk down the alley to
a nearby park.

I'm mostly a lurker in this newsgroup (r.a.sf.w) and I know I'm a few
days late and a couple dollars short with this, but I've been
incredibly busy ever since the eclipse happened and I'm just now
getting caught up with my newsgroup reading. This gives me a chance
to tell my eclipse story one last time, because everyone I know in
real life is sick of hearing it. Feel free to skip this post before
you get sick of hearing it too.

When I first read about this eclipse a few years ago, I immediately
decided I was going to drive south (from PA) to see it. My daughter,
at the time, was pretty enthusiastic about going along, but as it
turned out the date of the eclipse ended up being two days before she
was supposed to start her first year of college, so she didn't want to
go. Fortunately my wife, who had to stay home because she couldn't
get out of work, talked her into going along as a last
dad-and-daughter bonding adventure before she went off to college and
adulthood. We had a great time - she decided she was going to perfect
a southern accent and spent the whole time in the car practicing it
and telling me all about her fictional family from the deep south.
She had me rolling with a story about an old family recipe for a soup
made out of goats that they call "Clippity Clippity soup". I don't
know where she comes up with stuff like that.

The day before the eclipse we drove pretty much all day to
Elizabethtown, KY, which was the closest I could find a reasonably
priced hotel room. The plan was to drive the next day to
Hopkinsville, KY, the site of maximum totality. But we saw on the
local news that Hopkinsville was a madhouse of tourists, so we changed
plans and just drove straight south until we hit the center line of
totality.

As we wound through backwoods of TN, we hit a road that was completely
closed due to blasting and had to detour and got a bit lost. We ended
up driving into a tiny little town called Carthage, TN. There was a
mom-and-pop burger joint that had a big sign out front that said "Free
Eclipse Parking", so we went there. The family that owned the place
was super friendly and invited us to hang out and watch the eclipse
with them. We had perfect weather (not a cloud in the sky), shaded
outdoor seating and a bathroom and air conditioning in the resturant.
We pretty much stumbled into the perfect place to view the eclipse.
As a way of thanking the owners we ate lunch there, and our hot dogs,
drinks and popsicles came out to around $10.

The two block "downtown" area was having an eclipse festival, because
I think they thought they were going to get a lot more tourists than
they did. In fact, I'm amazed they DIDN'T get more tourists, because
this town couldn't have been more than a mile off the center line of
totality. We met one guy from New York who had picked the town
randomly on a map, and I'm pretty sure he was the only other non-local
there. In order to be good tourists, we bought some lemonade and a
few t-shirts - two Dark Side of the Moon-themed shirts that the local
high school marching band was selling, and one with a picture of the
eclipse, the name of the town and the exact latitude and longitude.

Before the eclipse started we went back to the burger place and joined
the folks there who were already wearing their eclipse glasses. I
figured the glasses wouldn't work well for me since I already wear
prescription glasses, so I had ordered two different types of "solar
filters" off Amazon - one was a set of cheap cardboard framea around
the same type of material that the glasses are made of, and the other
was a fairly nice, bigger, plastic-framed piece of dark glass. Both
meet ISO safety standards, but only the cheap cardboard ones arrived
in time for our trip. My wife texted me about 10 minutes before
totality to say that the mailman had just delivered the fancy glass
one. Oh well, at least she got to use it to view the eclipse from PA.

The moon started crossing the sun in the upper right corner, and after
the initial "oooh, ahhh, isn't that neat!", most people kind of
stopped paying attention until totality. At one point some guy in a
pickup truck drove by and yelled "What the hell you staring at, it's
just the damn moon!", which prompted the owner of the resturant to
say, in her sweetest southern accent, "Well, I guess every town has to
have its idiot".

As the eclipse progressed, I tried to take a few photos through the
solar filter with by my phone and a digital camera, but none of them
came out all that well.

Once the sun got beyond 95% or so covered, you could clearly tell the
area was rapidly getting darker and darker, and it almost seemed like
the color was starting to drain out of everything. And then totality
hit and there were audible gasps. From about four blocks away I heard
a woman scream "OH MY GOD!" like it was the rapture.

I spent the first minute or so trying to get pictures, and it didn't
seem like any of them were turning out, so I gave up and grabbed a
pair of binoculars that I'd borrowed from my parents. I had about a
minute and a half's worth of amazing view...but my first thought was
"wow, that's an amazing special effect." My brain just couldn't
accept that what it was seeing was real. My daughter attempted to
film the totality on her iPhone, and got a semi-decent video of it.

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. And then the edge of the sun
came back out and we got the diamond ring effect for a few seconds.
Then it was back to needing the filters because it was already too
bright to look at.

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.

Shortly before 3pm we stopped at a Chick-Fil-A and watched the last
little bit of the moon come off the sun while we ate. The place was
absolutely packed with people, which should have been another sign
that we weren't getting home any time soon. We heard one of the
employees tell a customer that when totality hit, their manager shut
down the resturant for two minutes so everyone could go outside and
see it. What a guy.

After that it was just stop and go traffic, mile after mile after
mile. We got stuck three times behind accidents that had the highway
at a standstill for hours. One of them was really bad - one of the
cars had caught fire and the front end was melted down to nothing. I
really hope that driver got out in time.

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.

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. Especially now that my daughter is off in college and my
wife and I are empty nesters. I'll always have this trip to remember.

Oh, and when I got home I discovered that one of the totality pictures
I took with the digital camera actually turned out semi-decent. I put
it up on my web site at:

http://eichler.byethost11.com/Totality.jpg

-- Bob