People always say that Grandpa Ned always said, “If there is no adversity, you don’t remember the trip.” Now, while that is partially true, I remember a lot of things with little to no adversity. And sometimes, like when trying to see a total solar eclipse that I’ve done a lot of work to prepare work, I’m totally happy with little to no adversity. Well, that didn’t exactly happen…and we’ll get to that.
As the eclipse was today, we had no real plans to leave the VRBO on any big excursion. I personally started by day with a big hike up to this old Moorish tower. Here is the Garmin of that hike:
https://connect.garmin.com/app/activity/23946372139
It was a pretty uphill hike, that’s for sure. Here are some photos of what I saw:
Because it was way too hot out, I just came back and joined the family poolside.
Now, let’s talk about how fun the eclipse was. So, as previously mentioned, our plan was to hike up from our VRBO to the ridge with the church on it. This would be about a 30 minute hike, so we decided to start it at 1830 local time. Totality would occur at 2030 local time. Therefore, leaving at 1830 would get us to the ridge an entire 90 minutes before we absolute had to look at the Sun. Perfect.
At 1830, all of us began the steep hike up to the ridge. We get 75% of the way there, and encounter a cop car. Apparently they had closed access to all hiking trails beyond the point as they didn’t want people to congregate and start a wildfire. That sort of made sense, but that also completely effed our plans. What to do now? Where to go? How to see? Well, I knew we would need to drive somewhere at this point, so I SPRINTED back down the hill to get my car, then drove back up to pick up the other drivers and deliver them to their cars. Keep in mind that I had already hiked a bunch today, AND at this point, we had just 90 minutes before totality.
So we had our cars and were ready to transport, but where to go? The entire plan relied on being on some part of the ridge. I knew that we had to drive around that mountain to get a good view, so that was a good start. Then, I remembered from the previous night staring at the train that one side of the train tracks should have a great view up the valley. So I led our caravan to that spot, hoping there were roads we could access.
Fortunately, this ended up being fairly straightforward. We found a good parking spot, and were set up almost an hour before totality was set to begin. Except, there was just one problem…
At least at this point, there was nothing we could do.
Fortunately, about 10 minutes out of totality, the Sun cleared the clouds:
We slapped on our eclipse glasses to find that much of the Sun was already covered. They are always very stylish.
Uncle Leif was optimistic the entire time, but I was SWEATING. So I was extremely relieved when that Sun finally cleared the clouds and we go to see totality. The videos won’t do it justice, but here’s one anyway:
And how about a nice photo Bae took of the group:
Successful mission.