MASS

It has been a long time since I blogged, but the August 21, 2017 eclipse makes me want to share my experiences.

My first tactic concerning the eclipse was to avoid crowds by targeting Nebraska over Carbondale, IL. Alliance, NE with its Car-Henge sculpture looked like a good spot. It would be a 835 miles trip from Villa Park, IL  We considered taking Amtrak to Minnesota so that we and our son could drive due west and approach Nebraska from the north. Hopefully highways would be less traveled than the southern approach which could be flooded with people from Denver. As I monitored sky cover predictions, I looked for other sites a little closer on the eastern side of Nebraska. Ravenna, NE was only 628 miles (9 hr 21 min travel time) from home, had a population of 1300 and was selling $10 tickets to their baseball fields. I especially like Nebraska because Interstate 80 went east-west through the total eclipse zone for at least a couple hundred miles.This would allow for last minute shifting due to any predicted clouds.

That all changed on Aug 19. I had been monitoring "sky cover" conditions with SkippySky and NOAA's National Digital Forecast Database for a few days. With the 8AM Aug 19 prediction, NOAA "sky cover" percentage was 45% for Ravenna and 55% for Alliance in Nebraska, Carbondale was 32% and Tennessee was 18%. I quickly started to check out 11 towns in Kentucky and Tennessee.

The city of Gallatin, TN, about 30 miles northeast of Nashville and 463 miles from home (7 hr 26 min travel time), seemed to have the best plans with an event called "Eclipse Encounter" in a place called Triple Creek Park. Even though there was no charge, they had an online EventBrite site to make an RSVP for an electronic ticket.With only 2 days to go, I reserved three tickets and was surprised that only several hundred tickets out of 1500 had been requested.

I continued to monitor "sky cover" predictions until 6 AM on Sunday, Aug. 20th. It wasn't great news. Tennessee had degraded to 26% but Nebraska was 46-62% and Carbondale was also 26%. We left with my son driving his truck at 10:30 AM with the intent of getting as close to Gallatin as possible. Eventually our stopping place was the Four Point Hilton hotel in Louisville, KY. We still had about 160 miles to make Gallatin and if we wanted to arrive at the park at 5 AM, that meant a wake up time of 12:45 AM.This might have been the most expensive hotel stay on an hourly basis. The room cost $200 and we were only there for 8 hours of which only 3 hours were sleep.

We left the hotel at 1:35 AM and I immediately was concerned that the powers to be didn't want us to make it to the eclipse. One interchange down the road, Interstate 65 was closed due to an accident. We exited, travelled side roads for a couple of interchanges and got back on.Our only other stop was at a Waffle House when we started taking state highway109 at the Kentucky-Tennessee border. It was freezing in the restaurant and service was sloooooow!

We arrived at Triple Creek Park at 5:05 AM and we were maybe the 50th car into the park. I looked at the stars in the sky to determine our compass directions. Using my SkyGuide app on my phone, I determined the position of the sun at eclipse time. We waited in the truck until daylight broke and some of the dew burned off the grass. Rather than carry our chairs any distance, we decided to set up just on the edge of the 300 car parking lot. We pitched our chairs only about 50 feet from the truck.

The partial eclipse started at 11:59:04 CDT. I was surprised that the 7 hours of waiting went pretty fast. It helped to make a few indoor bathroom breaks which was a several block walk but better than the port-a-potie option. Carol and I purchase three Gallatin Eclipse shirts for $15 each. Lucky we had the exact $45 or we would have had to wait for the lady with change. I struck up a few conversations with a gentleman and his daughter from Dayton, Ohio, a lady wearing a Bar Harbor, Maine t-shirt and a couple of guys with a sun projection device and a large pair of binoculars with solar filters on it. Our solar glasses from Triton came in handy to monitor the progress of the partial eclipse.

Temperatures were rising to about 90 degrees with high humidity. The three of us did our best to stay under our two umbrellas. Lucky our son Curt brought the bigger umbrella. A few clouds started to form in the sky. At one point the sun was covered for a few minutes.As the partial eclipse progressed, looking around the park, it seemed that things were taking on a darker tint like if you were wearing sunglasses.

It was another hour and a half until totality started at 1:27:25 PM. What a cosmic and emotional moment. I got a lump in my throat as the crowd oh'ed and ah'ed as darkness decended.What a cool effect to see the last bit of sun called the "diamond ring" disappear. Now, no eye protection was needed. We were going to get the full 2 min and 40 sec of totality with no cloud near the sun. The center line of the eclipse path went right through the north end of the park, so we were within a mile of that. I used a hand held finder scope with 9x to look at the sun but it was too jittery to get a decent glimpse of the sun. Just staring with my eyes, I saw three spikes in the corona. Two were on the west and one on the east. The sky had a strange pearlescence color to it. Looking at the people near by, they seemed like cardboard cutouts moving in front of a flat background. What a strange feeling to look up and see a round black ball where the sun used to be.

It was a very quick two and a half minutes. Once again the "diamond ring" appeared on the western edge of the sun. You knew that signaled the end of totality. Sky & Telescope said you could look at this phase of the eclipse for only 5 seconds before risking eye damage. Back on with the eclipse glasses. We didn't dawdle and began to pack up our stuff. Being so close to the truck, we thought we'd beat the crowd out of the park.

By 1:40 PM we were pulling out of our parking spot but so were many thousands of the 50-60,000 people in the park. It took 20 minutes to exit the park. Driving went well for a while until we go to I65. Stop and go traffic with the stops lasting 15 minutes. Waze my traffic app on my phone send us on a couple of goose chases trying to save some ficticious minutes. Some of the back roads were so narrow, two cars barely fit and the corn was growing 3 feet from the edge of the road.

We drove a few hundred miles to the west on the William Natcher ParkWay and the Audubon Parkway from Bowling Green to avoid the traffic on I65 but heading north on HW41 we again came to a complete standstill. We gave up and stayed at a hotel in Evansville, IN. Moral of the story: it pays to hunker down for at least a day after the eclipse.The next morning we zigzaged our way to I57 and back home. What a wonderful life memory!