Finally getting around to my experience of the eclipse.
I saw the eclipse back in 2017 in Central Nebraska, and it was the most awe inspiring thing I’ve ever seen. The group of us that saw the eclipse knew immediately we would travel wherever we needed to see the next one in 2024.
About a year ago, I started trying to make plans for accommodations, which we thought at the time would be trying to find a big Airbnb house in Texas for our group of 20 people or so that would be traveling to see the eclipse.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck and began looking at hotels, mainly for my family, and then trying to coordinate with the others in our group. My first hotel I booked was in Fort Smith, Arkansas, as I thought my family would leave the Friday before the eclipse and make a weekend out of it in Arkansas at the Crater of Diamonds State Park.
Somewhere around June of last year I booked a room for a rate of $110 on Friday 4/5 in Ft Smith, with another room booked in Texarkana, TX for 4/6.
In September of last year, I received a call from the hotel in Fort Smith saying there was an error with the rate that I booked and that the correct rate was actually $899 per night and if I wanted to stay there, I would have to cancel my room and rebook it at the correct rate. I told the lady on the phone they’re nuts, and initially didn’t do anything with the reservation. The funny thing is it stayed as an active reservation at the low rate all the way up until a couple of weeks before, when I decided I would just cancel it not wanting to potentially deal with any problems.
To complete our nights for the trip, I found a couple of places in Texas south of Dallas that I booked for a good rate. However, again one of the locations called me and claimed that the rate was incorrect and that the correct rate was $500 per night. This hotel actually did cancel my reservation without telling me in advance.
In the end, the five families in our group all ended up staying in different cities and made different plans. Oh well!
Back to the eclipse itself, as the days drew closer and the weather looked iffy for Texas, I decided we would target northern Arkansas or southern Missouri in the path of totality. The night before the eclipse we had found a cheap room in Branson, Missouri, and spent the night there, and the morning of we decided to head east towards south central Missouri, and the town of Thayer, Missouri.
We arrived just as the eclipse was starting. I wanted to document the eclipse so I had brought my camcorder and Nikon camera with my telephoto lens. Unfortunately, we didn’t leave as early as we wanted to in the morning which really pushed time for setting up my equipment. I found myself doing that more than watching the eclipse before totality.
My biggest goal for this eclipse was to try to photograph the prominences if possible. Of course, as it turned out, they were easily seen with the naked eye, and so I was able to get some good pictures of the prominences.
The four minutes flew by of course, and this one seemed even better than the last one, especially with how dark it got.
Unlike the last eclipse where I stayed all the way until the eclipse ended, this time we left about 30 minutes after totality ended. We made our way towards the highway and soon realized the amount of traffic was already increasing so we stopped at the Dairy Queen in town to try to allow more time before getting on the road. Once we left town, we ran into about 3 to 4 times where traffic slowed to a crawl and lasted about 15 to 20 minutes each time before picking up speed again.
We made it back to Omaha about 130 in the morning with it taking about 10 hours instead of what should’ve been 7 1/2 hours.
I’ve included the video I made of totality with my camcorder as well as a few of my pictures I took.
phys.org
