Eclipse!

Another two-part adventure! I'm in standard, My father is in italics.

About two weeks before the eclipse, I decided I would go watch the eclipse and see totality.  The closest areas were in South Carolina and Tennessee.  Knowing how busy I-95 can get, and wary of the potential for clouds closer to the ocean, I opted for Tennessee.  The plan had been to kind of get close and then drive into the totality zone between Knoxville and Chattanooga that morning.  I found about 8 Hampton Inns in the Knoxville area that were sold out, but finally found one south of town, across the street from the airport (and actually in the zone of totality) that had a room.

As the first total eclipse of my lifetime (in the US) approached, I was tossing around the idea of taking the trip down. Looking at routes, looking for friends who were going, and a week before the event my dad tells me he has a hotel room in TN! It’s on! Let's do this!

T-24:00
We set out on Sunday afternoon, planning to drive down to our hotel in Alcoa – just outside Knoxville and just inside the totality! It was a long trip, but by trading off every two hours (and not thinking about it) it didn’t feel as oppressive as it might. As we drove we were surrounded by other northerners coming down to see the event. PA, NJ&NY, even Maine, Vermont, and a few Canadian plates.  Weirdly, everyone seemed to be in good spirits. People drove courteously, and had a tendency to slow down miles ahead of any traffic jams, building pockets they could later absorb. I think a sense of camaraderie and universal use of GPS contributed to this. But as the traffic grew, so did our fears for Monday’s traffic – when all the people who trickled to the totality over the past few days would all (attempt to) return home at the same time. 

The highway kept getting busier as Brice took a shift at the wheel, and down in SW Virginia, about 4 or 5 hours into the trip began slowing and stopping.  I was looking at the car GPS, his phone, my phone’s maps and Waze.  We took a couple quick detours on local roads to avoid stopped traffic.

On one of these detours, suggested by our GPS's (Ancient mariner’s proverb: “Never take two chronometers to sea, rather take one or three”) we stopped at Happy Food Mart - a gas station that was doing constant business.  All the pumps were in use, there was a line for the restroom, and the shelves were picked bare – snowpocalypse level “Well, this aisle is empty..."  I found the last bag of Chex mix, Dad picked up an only slightly expired Little Debbie Apple Pie, and we headed back out to the highway.  Which was flowing beautifully! It seems the traffic jam we bypassed was metering out traffic behind us, and we gratefully headed south.

T-14:30

Traffic steadily eased up the rest of the trip, and we arrived at the Hampton Inn Airport in Alcoa Tennessee at midnight, about 9 hours and 450 miles later.  We were safely “inside the zone”!

T-4:30

I went to the smallest hotel workout room I have ever seen, we ate the standard comp breakfast (with all the other eclipse seekers), and hit the road around 9:30 or so.  We had filled up with gas before checking in, and decided that it would be wise to get lunch at the local subway and avoid the rush.  This was a good call!  We then turned to go south on the local 4-lane road, and it was so chock full of traffic it was hard to find a gap to pull out!   Absolutely flooded with cars heading south from Noxville. Just a constant, two-lane stream of traffic, like hurricane evacuation footage. At this point we switched into full crowd-avoidance mode. Armed with our three GPS’s and a map with the totality zone sketched across it, we set off towards the totality on whichever road appeared convenient and empty. We made our way down empty back roads (“Take 6 Mile Road 8 miles to 4 Mile Road”) down to a surprisingly empty Highway 72, one of the main east-west routes within our region of the totality. This would give us the ability to flee small clouds if they popped up to ruin the show.  We took an even smaller backroad and arrived at the Little Tennessee River (which was more of a lake at this point) and scouted out a few spots, all of which had great southern and upward visibility.

T-3.30

But was it the best spot? Since we still had about two hours we went over 5 miles to Venore.  Lots of traffic, people selling parking for $10, police directing traffic, etc.  Tried one state park—closed.  (why have a park if you’re going to close it the most important day of the year?!) Tried another that let us in, but there was a line of traffic waiting for parking. Brice suggested that it might take us an hour to get out of that park, and then another hour to get back across the Venore bridge (described strategically as choke points), so we gave up on that and went back to the side road by the water (old Route 72, on a wide dammed spot on the Little Tennessee River, upstream from Tellico Dam and Venore).

T-2.00

Our secret spot now had people! But only half a dozen cars spread out along the riverfront, so no worries. We parked in the shade, checked the time, and went out to meet our neighbors. One young man had his own machinists shop, and we met an older man who had come ashore from his boat for a run. Most of our neighbors were from “the next county over” and were already swimming in the river (a few of them fully dressed).  It was borderline hot out, so we suited up to join them!  The bottom was muddy, but other than that it was great swimming, complimented by a great jumping rock (about the size of Brice’s sprinter van, rising 6 feet out of the lake).  We spent an hour floating around, chatting, jumping off the rock (It looks much larger when jumping off than it does looking up at it), and trying various climbing routes – bailing into the river when our hands slipped. It was great.   

T-1:00

We decided to eat our lunch before the eclipse hit, so we got out of the river to dry off. I put on my glasses to test them out and was surprised to see a small chunk missing from the sun! It was starting!  We alerted our neighbors, passed out our extra glasses, and had lunch while keeping an eye on it.  I tried to take a few pictures using filters, but none of them turned out. We made pinhole cameras, found leaf-hole cameras, got all our gear in order, and watched the progress of the moon. One of the neighbors projected the image with a magnifying glass and we could see it—though it was so bright you had to use the welder’s helmets they had brought.

T-0:20

We could finally see a difference in the world around us. The sun was 65% occluded (75-80% ((he's probably right...)) ),  and you no longer needed to squint at all when you looked around, your pupils could relax a bit. It was basically like a cloudy day, except there were still clear shadows everywhere. It was also at this point that the bugs started making noise. Our neighbors (at least the younger generation) swam out to the jumping-rock to watch.  The clouds remained low behind us, and we were confident we wouldn’t have to do any last-minute scrambling for open sky.

T-0:10

As it got to 95% it got noticeably quiet, and the temperature cooled down about 10 or 15 degrees.  We checked our gear for a final time, and checked the sky map to verify potential planet locations. We knew Venus would be visible and that there was a chance at Mars, but we also learned that Mercury was up too! We reviewed our during-eclipse plans to make sure we didn’t forget anything.

T-0:02

Much darker. The light was like a huge storm was overhead, only the shadows were still crisp. You definitely got a sense that something was wrong.  We settled in to watch the eclipse and it was no longer small glances but we started starting constantly at the sun. It seemed to take a long time to snuff out the last few percent.  It looked like a very hot orange crescent, getting ever smaller.. No longer growing thinner, now it only appeared like the ends were sucking in at barely-perceptible pace. I made the mistake of glancing at the sun with no glasses, only to be blinded.

T-0:00:30

The world around us (looking under the glasses) was darkening now at a visible pace. I again checked the sun sans-protection, and again blinded myself.  

T-0:00:00

We were laying in the middle of the street staring up when finally, with a twinkle, the sun went dark. I whipped my glasses off, and told my dad to do the same. You see what seems to be a black sun!  The moon is all black, surrounded by the white corona.  Very other-worldly and awe-inspiring. In the blink of the eye someone had removed the sun from the sky and replaced it with a painting from science fiction. A cgi masterpiece, one of those pictures you’d see and say “That could never be real”. The corona was large, much wider than expected! Venus was exceptionally bright, and right next to the sun we could see Mercury! A few stars appeared but Mars was nowhere to be seen.  I snapped off a few pictures on my camera, and dad pulled out the binoculars which gave us an even better view of the corona.  It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.    We checked out the surroundings, and it did look like the sun had just set over every horizon. It wasn’t as dark as night – you could still see enough to navigate and find things, but it was definitely not day. Probably the equivalent of 30 minutes after sunset, when there is still some light in the sky.   I attempted a selfie with my phone, but it didn’t turn out and I discarded the phone, not wanting to distract from the moment.  Across the river, someone fired a cannon, which didn’t interrupt the bugs chirping their hearts out at all.  As we sun-gazed I considered looking again through the binoculars when the trailing edge of the eclipse began to brighten slightly. After a second, maybe two, there were two brilliant points of light (caused by moon-mountains!) that scaled up in intensity from bright to blinding within milliseconds. 

T+0:02:20

We watched with the eclipse glasses as the crescent came sliding out to the right, and just like that, the eclipse was over.  It felt much quicker than the 2+ minutes it lasted. It was still dark, and we watched the curiously dark shadows as the sun began to reappear.  We recounted what we saw, heard a few more cannon shots, and watched the eclipse-pattern on the hood of our car grow again.

T+0:09 After a few minutes the world appeared as it had before. Almost cloudy, but definitely daytime, and we looked at each other, content with our eclipse experience.   We said goodbye to our neighbors, jumped in the van, and headed back up the backroads, trying to keep ahead of the legion of people we knew were just south of us.  Everything went beautifully for the first half hour, then we hit the first town.  We detoured through neighborhoods, constantly checking the GPSs.  We kept plotting escape routes, only to watch them turn yellow and red before we got to them. Luckily, we made it through the town, out the other side, and traffic calmed down. There was still a lot of it, but it was moving.

T+1:00 Near Kodiak, at the last stoplight before getting up onto the interstate, we caught just the slightest nibble of moon over the sun. We took one last glimpse through the sunroof as the eclipse ended, and the sun returning to its fully spherical shape.  Then we put away our glasses and pulled onto the highway.  Traffic was heavy, but rarely bad. It stopped once or twice, but generally ran at 60-70mph and again there was a sense of camaraderie on the road.

T+5:00 The crossword puzzle wanted one of the letters to be ‘duck’ . Binned. Back to trying to talk through orbital mechanics.

T+9.5 We finally made it home around midnight!   A very long two days and lots of miles, but absolutely worth it!  Never saw it before, may never see it again, and it was really amazingly awesome!   All in all we’d driven 1098 miles in 36 hours for just 2 minutes of astronomical magic – Totally worth it.