Eclipse Chasers

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I'm pretty sure I have a Travel Blog post with the exact same titlefrom 2017. In fact, when I'm done writing this blog post, I should compare the two. I suspect they'll be very similar!

Just like in 2017, we hopped in our car to chase totality.

We're staying in Austin, Texas. Our original plan was to watch the eclipse from the hotel to avoid having to deal with traffic afterwards. It was a great plan except for the clouds. Today, Austin is forecasted to have almost 90%!c(MISSING)loud cover. I scoured the weather reports for nearby towns. Things are worse to the south and southwest of us. Cloud-wise, it's about the same directly west. North is slightly better. But northwest... northwest is where it's at! We decided our best bet was to head to a town called Llano. The forecast for Llano looked pretty good--about 40%!c(MISSING)loud cover during the eclipse. It also has a supercharger, which is very important for Paul & Colleen to be able to charge up the Tesla. Lastly, it has multiple roads leading out from Llano, making a good home base for eclipse chasing. Some rural towns only have one highway going through it. Llano has multiple highways branching out, so if clouds were to roll in, we could head north, northwest, west, south, or east. It was perfect!

We set out for Llano by 9:30am and arrived around 10:30am. We found parking pretty easily. We walked around a little bit, checking out the cute, rustic town. Ultimately, we decided to hang out in a local coffee shop called Fuel until it was time for the partial eclipse (partial was going to start around 12:30pm, and the total eclipse would occur at 1:34pm). A sweet couple was set up in front of the coffee shop, selling their eclipse posters. Colleen bought me one, which was the perfect gift!

Llano is a town of about 3,500 people. It's not a very big place at all. On this eclipse day, there was a line literally out the door of the coffee shop for the entire time we were there. The owner and workers just had the absolute best attitude about it and didn't seem overwhelmed at all. The owner kept making delicious goodies in the back, and he would carry them up to the front pastry case announcing things like, "Fresh chocolate chip cookies!" and "Fresh cinnamon rolls!" They couldn't keep anything in stock. I was amazed that the food kept coming, and they didn't seem to run out of anything. They planned well for the eclipse! I was happy for them that the forecast was so good for Llano. It meant a lot of people were driving up this way.

I got an iced, decaf Americano. Colleen got a cherry Italian soda. Andrew got a java chip blended, frozen coffee. Joanna and Oliver each got some sort of frozen blended drink (Oliver got strawberries & cream, and Joanna got something with chocolate). It was fun to people watch and check out all the fun posters and notices on the bulletin boards. At one point, I checked the forecast, and everything still looked good for Llano. Outside, the skies were mostly blue. It was perfect! We continued hanging out in the coffee shop on the soft couches. When it got close to 12:30pm, we decided we should get the lawn chairs out of the car and walk to the nearby park to watch the eclipse. We stepped out and looked up and saw.... clouds. What the what! Andrew pulled out his phone so we could check the weather. Clouds were rolling into Llano, and the forecast was now for 80% cloud cover at 2pm. It was going to get worse, not better! I checked the forecast in nearby towns. North was the way to go. Just 15 minutes north of Llano, in Cherokee, the forecast was for 50% clouds at 2pm. We jumped in the car and drove to Cherokee.

Cherokee is a small town. It has a school, a church, and a couple of restaurants, but no gas station. I used the restroom at a pizza place and gave them a dollar for letting me use their bathroom. We drove across the street to the church and started watching the partial eclipse with our eclipse glasses. We could watch for a few minutes, but then big clouds would roll by and block out our view for the next few minutes. As the clouds kept coming, there was less and less blue. The way the clouds kept coming, and the minutes that would stretch by where we couldn't see the partial eclipse, I figured we'd have about a 50/50 shot of seeing totality if we stayed where we were.

We decided it would be smart to move just a little bit northwest. We pulled up Google Maps and found a little highway called 319. It's an unpaved highway, and we turned on it and started heading northwest. We only got about 2 blocks when it ended abruptly at someone's property. On Google Maps, the road keeps going. In actuality, it ends at someone's property line and gates. A couple from California was there, parked at a little turnaround, and they were surprised we'd found the same location as them. I wanted to be happy with where we ended up, but I wasn't satisfied with the location. I didn't think we went north enough with all the clouds coming in, but it was already 1:20pm. Totality was in less than 15 minutes. Paul and Colleen decided to stay, but I decided we should hop back on Texas Highway 16--the main road going through Cherokee--and get further north. That's where the bluer skies were. We got back on the main highway, and you could literally see on the road the edge of the clouds in the shadows. We would drive through a cloud's shadow, then a bunch of sun, then another cloud's shadow, then a bunch of sun. The clouds were moving quickly, and we could see the shadows moving in front of us. We had 2 minutes until totality! We reached a big patch of sun on the highway. We decided to drive to the end of it and park, to get as big of a stretch of clear sky as we could. Let me be clear: Pulling off on the side of a highway is not what you're supposed to do during an eclipse. However, at this point, there were cars parked all along the highway! We parked with the rest of them, and I directed our kids to stay on the grassy side of the car so the car could provide protection for us from any highway traffic (thankfully, we only saw 2 cars pass us the whole time. I think everyone else stopped). We put on our eclipse glasses and saw just a sliver of the sun....

...and then it was gone.

Was it clouds, or...? I took off my eclipse glasses and saw blackness. Then, a moment later, the corona exploded in its glorious circle in the sky. Totality! We were all exclaiming. I can't even remember what all was said, but I remember both of my kids being in awe! And, I'm such a sap, I started to cry. Totality is just so beautiful, and there it was! And we made it! I noted that, this time, it looked like the pictures (only better!). I could see the white corona and the dark center. It's so weird, but in 2017, the total eclipse looked red and orange and yellow to me, like flames. In the night sky with 360 degree twilight around us, we could see the eclipsed sun, Jupiter, and Venus. After a minute of gaping at totality, I decided that I wanted to see details this time and opened the car door to dig out my binoculars. You cannot--cannot--look at the sun with binoculars for even a second, as it magnifies the light into your eyes, but you can look at the total eclipse with them because the sun is completely covered by the moon. From what I'd read, if you have 3 minutes of totality, you should be smart and not use the binoculars in the first minute or last minute, but you can use it in the middle of totality so you have a buffer to make sure you're not using them when the sun reemerges. I dug around for a few seconds and gave up trying to find them. We had about 4 minutes of totality, and it wasn't worth it to spend a minute trying to find the binoculars. Well, it's a good thing I didn't find them because the four minutes was up so fast. I would have guessed we were about 2 minutes in when the first gleam of the sun's ray appeared in the bottom right of totality. It was the diamond ring! I remember saying aloud, "Diamond ring! Diamond ring! Time to put our glasses back on!" And, just like that, the total eclipse was over.

If we weren't on the side of the highway, I would have wanted to stay put a few minutes just to process everything. Instead, we hopped back in the car, drove a few hundred feet north to a turnaround, and then headed back the way we came. We were grinning and giddy with the excitement of having seen the total solar eclipse. I hoped so much that Paul & Colleen got to see it, too, but we had no service to text them to find out. When we got back to Cherokee, we pulled over at the church again to look for them. Either they'd left ahead of us or were hanging out in their viewing spot a little longer to see the partial eclipse after totality. Either way, it didn't make sense to keep hanging out at the church. We decided to keep heading south to Llano, where we would get cell service.

We beat most of the traffic out of Llano. When we reached Paul and Colleen, we found out they had gotten to see totality, too! They could see it for most of the 4 minutes. So, we probably should have stayed put and watched with them, but hindsight is 20/20. I'm so glad it worked out where they got to see it, and I'm so glad it worked out where we got to see it! Later, I found out that many people in Austin got at least a few seconds' glimpse of totality, too. So, even if we had stayed in Austin, we would have likely gotten to see it... but only briefly. We made the best choice we could every step of the way, and it worked out. Of course, some of it was luck, too!

The drive home got a little rough at times, but it wasn't as bad as we'd feared. In total, we drove about 1.5 hours from Austin. On the way back, it took about 3 hours. So, it was double the drive time, not triple (which had been my conservative estimate). We made it back to our hotel close to 5pm. Andrew dropped us off and went out to get Subway for the kids and some vegetarian meals for the two of us from a nearby restaurant called Dog Haus. Paul and Colleen topped off the Tesla at the supercharger in Llano and grabbed dinner there, so they arrived at the hotel well after us. When they arrived, we celebrated Paul's birthday with the eclipse donuts. After the birthday celebration, we got ready for bed, and I started packing up my eclipse gear, wondering when the next time would be that I would need it all again.

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Photos

Driving into Llano
The skies look pretty clear for the eclipse!

The Testicle Festival
Unfortunately, it's a month away.