(Yawn.)
But some Smarter-Than-You Meanderers headed up to Oregon in hopes of viewing the total, totally amazing, not-since-1918-coast-to-coast-in-the-U.S. eclipse.
Theresa Fisher (who now does Zumba instead of Meandering), her husband Tony, and Theresa Fisher's sister (who lives in Sacramento) planned to spend Saturday night in Klamath Falls, and then drive to and stay at Madras in Central Oregon, one of the expected-to-be prime spots for eclipse viewing. (See her comments to this post about her eclipse experience and the long, long trip home.)
In mid-February, Dick Jordan, permanently "meandered" to Eugene, about an hour's drive (without traffic) south of the eclipse's "path of totality."
His wife, Cindy, was content to view the 99% eclipse from the aptly-name "Solarium" atop the retirement community where they reside. Dick, having not a lick of common sense, opted to get up at 5:15 a.m., hop on the retirement community's 14-passenger bus at 7:00, and attempt to reach Sweet Home to the northeast.
News media predicted completely clogged roads, gas stations running out of fuel, and grocery stores emptied of food and water as an estimated 1 million non-Oregonian "Eclipsomaniacs" invaded the state.
Although Dick saw almost nothing but California license plates on cars passing his bus as it headed north on I-5 this morning, and during the return trip to Eugene at four hours later, traffic was generally moving at or close to the limit on the freeway. And once his bus meandered off onto backroads, cars were few and far between, and only a few folks had stationed themselves at viewing points along Highway 20, the "main drag" through Sweet Home.
Here's a raw, as yet unedited video "selfie" Dick took of himself when the moon had nearly covered the sun, then finally blocked it out entirely, and then began to move away about a minute later.
The day before the eclipse, Wendy, Bill and their friends Kathy and Phil from Petaluma, arrived in Eugene for lunch with Dick and Cindy. Wendy and Bill joined Dick and Cindy for dinner Sunday evening before heading off to a local motel where they'd spend the night before driving north to Corvallis Monday morning in order to have a good shot at seeing the eclipse.
Like Dick, they encountered no traffic on the way to Corvallis and, through an exchange of text messages, Dick confirmed that they also were able to experience "totality."
Wendy, who planned to head south to Ashland to overnight Monday before returning to Marin on Tuesday, will undoubtedly give a fuller account of her trip to Oregon and eclipse experience when you next see her.
1 comment:
From Theresa Fisher: Thank you, Dick, for the video. So happy you got to see it.
The "Great American Eclipse of 2017"is an event I shall never forget. While being the 2nd total solar eclipse I've experienced, it is the first without a cloud cover, and was the shortest 2 minutes and 2 seconds of my life. There is so much to drink in when totality is approaching, from the lowering temperature, crispness of shadows, and diminishment of light, you feel like you're in a wonderful science experiment. When the moon reaches the surgical precise position of cutting, flawlessly, the perimeter of the sun, it is an unparallelled contrast of light and dark. Surely, this is a CGI projection, right? It can't possibly be real. BUT IT IS!
My advise to anyone travelling to see a total elipse is to make it an actual vacation. Tony was scheduled to teach a class Tuesday morning, so we had to leave immediately after totality in order to drive all the way back to Sacramento and San Rafael that day. Unfortunately, thousands of others must have had a similar time constraints, as it took us 12 hours to drive the first 100 miles. We made it home on Tuesday at 10:32am, about 5 minutes shy of a 24-hour marathon drive. Tony, after driving 9 hours, was able to snooze in the back seat, but missed his class (arrangements had been made, just in case), and my sister and I were totally exhausted. One thing that came out of this long journey home, was the decision to proudly declare ourselves as "Totalitarians."
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