Eclipse chasers! I was having second thoughts about going up to Idaho for the eclipse (fears of traffic, all that extra driving, possibly running out of food or gas, post-apocalyptic conditions on the road), but I am so glad that these kids and I made the trip.
My biggest fear was actually that we would get up early Monday morning, drive for hours, but be stuck in traffic and not make it to the path of totality before the eclipse happened. From what I was hearing, 99% is nothing like 100% and wouldn't make it feel worth it. So we decided to leave Sunday night and just sleep in the car somewhere up there.
The drive was smooth, no traffic at all, and when we got to Idaho Falls, we found plenty of room in a church parking lot, with this beautiful view of the temple.
Awake and getting excited! Sleeping in the car actually went better than I'd hoped. We had one car of noisy neighbors pull in around 3 a.m., and I had a really hard time going back to sleep, but the kids all slept pretty well. A couple inches of memory foam makes a pretty good bed.
And then we had a couple hours of killing time.
We tried out lots of different ways to see the eclipse stages--pinhole in a paper plate was cool. (Bean drew a lot of sketches of the sun along the way.)
The reflection through the trees was even cooler.
I thought it was beautiful, with the breeze making the shadows and light move around.
But nothing compared to totality. And pictures (especially the one I managed to get) don't do it justice. We were trying to take in all the different things that happen, the sky darkening, 360 degree sunset, stars coming out, the corona, temperature dropping. It all went by too fast, and was such an intense couple of minutes. It's so overwhelming and though I don't have words to really describe what it felt like, it somehow feels like it puts us in our place in the universe. I got choked up, the kids were all crazy excited. It truly was a spiritual experience. It was worth every minute of driving and discomfort (and those ended up being a lot of minutes!)
And then we were on the other side. Glasses had to go back on, and slowly the moon pulled away. It's amazing how something that was so cool can seem so anticlimactic just a few minutes later. The build up to the total eclipse was really fun to watch, and I had thought we'd enjoy seeing those same sights as the sun came back out, but it really didn't seem like much of anything. I wish we'd been packed up and ready to drive then--would have saved us about 3 hours in the car later, but we weren't.
Instead, we went for a walk along the river and enjoyed seeing a little of Idaho Falls.
The kids liked these benches.
View of the falls.
And again.
The kids kept peeking at the sun, just to check on the progress. They saw it through to the end, but everyone was pretty tired, tired of walking around, tired from not enough sleep, probably tired of vacationing.
We left around 1:45 and then proceeded to take 4 hours to travel 55 miles. At that point, we stopped for dinner and I was REALLY hoping that google maps wasn't wrong and that the worst of it was over. Because 4 hours of broken sleep, a sore throat, and being the solo driver for the last 2 weeks was getting to me. Thank goodness it only took another 4 hours to get home and we were all tucked in bed by 10:30. I'd do it again, but I think next eclipse, we should find somewhere to stay overnight, and we'll bring Daddy-o along.
