eclipse chasing, undergrad edition by Audrey C. '24

• Kano
• Allison 
• Amber 
• Ali
• Audrey

Kano ’25

I felt profoundly small. The world was changing right before my eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. At first, it felt like nothing was happening but, then, the entire landscape transformed. 

The moment was ephemeral. For totality, the difference between 99% and 100% felt far beyond between 0% and 99%. My eyes began to well, and I couldn’t have prepared myself for the stir of emotions that suddenly flooded me: awe, joy, confusion, denial, and horror. The world shifted for a moment and, slowly but surely, it faded back into what was, as if nothing had happened.

I thought about the rise and fall of the sun. Every day, we have a peaceful dawn and an idyllic sundown, yet they seem to mostly exist in the background of our lives. If sunrises and sunsets occurred more rarely, perhaps we would take a longer look at them. Scarcity breeds demand or whatever. 

In that same vein, if total eclipses occurred daily, would my friends and I have woken up at 4:00 am to drive for 4 hours to the tippity top of Vermont and 10 hours back to arrive back home on a school night at 3:00 am the following day?

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I planned most of the trip in our Notion page. Here’s the first part of it:

Also made a fitting playlist:

We had a good crew. I planned the trip. Daina N. ‘25 drove mostly in the city and is an EAPS major,⁠01 Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences a.k.a. big Earth nerd. Isaac L. ‘25 drove mostly out of the city and is an astrophotographer. Caitlin O. ‘25 was our backup-turned-main driver. Oris S. N. ‘23 is a massive astrophysics nerd in every way and detailed our adventure in an email he sent out to some friends. I forwarded that email over to some of my friends. Here are some excerpts:

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we did it :)

also, i find it cute that the last two trips i went on match up with lyrics from You’re So Vain by Carly Simon (excellent cheeky fun song):

Then you flew your lear jet up to Nova Scotia

To see the total eclipse of the sun

———- Forwarded message ———

From: Oris

Date: Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 8:16 PM

Subject: Re: Eclipse of April 8th, 2024

To: oris_pals

Hi all,

Yesterday, as everyone probably is aware, was a Solar Eclipse day. […]

Here is my adventure:

     […] We had originally planned to go to St Albans City in Vermont but, early on the way we then decided to go to Newport, VT, given some discouraging changes in St Albans weather forecast. We arrived at Newport at ~8:30am, so we had hours and hours of spare time before the Eclipse started. Yay!

Kano and Daina […] found a small lakeshore beach, the Prouty Beach at Boston Park (yes we went from Boston to Boston haha), that had an spectacularly unobstructed view of the sky.

[…] After setting my equipment there and testing polar alignment and sun photos, Kano[, Caitlin, and I] went for a stroll in the town. Newport is a lovely town and it was definitely not made to have as many people as it had yesterday lol. […]

At 2:16pm EST, April 8th 2024, the spectacle started. 

[…] The totality was predicted for 15:27:07 of where we were. I had my laptop open, monitoring Stellarium the whole time so I could keep track of coverage levels. Every 10 mins I would take a photo of the Sun:

After I got that last photo, I had a plan: I’d wait for the totality start, fully experiencing that with no distractions of cameras or telescope, and I’d let myself be on that state for 30s in totality, when then I’d snap back to take a photo of it and once I was satisfied, go back to the experiencing it with no distractions so I could see it end.

[…] Now, I’m not proud of it, but I did glance at the Sun without my glasses a few times (please NEVER do that, I was being stupid). […] Some takeaways from these small experiences:

1. DON’T DO IT it is dangerous…
2. You can’t see anything interesting at all for most of the time. […]
3. At about 85% coverage I took a glance and once again did not see anything interesting tho the after shadow of the Sun in my retina […] was crescent shape! 

[…] We waited… We noticed that the environment was getting colder […] It was also noticeable that it was getting darker […] When I noticed that it was at about 93%, I bumped my friends to look around and feel the moment: that was what Boston was experiencing, and that was the max of what it would experience. […]

We were approaching Totality. […]

95%

Nothing.

97%

Nothing.

98%

Nothing.

Then, the last 20 seconds all happened at once.

[…] The Sun went from glaring to dark in a second, with the last glimpse of the Sun’s incredible brightness disappearing in a shinny dot of light in the edge of the disk of the Eclipse. […] If I […] wasn’t aware an Eclipse was happening, I would only notice something at the last 10-20 seconds. 

I understand why Solar Eclipses were regarded as mystical events for most of the history of humanity. […] Nothing can prepare someone to one of these. […] The sky was in a mix of night time with dawn and sunrise, but all directions of the horizon glowed. […] It was crisp, and it was impossible. 

[…] Finally, with the Eclipse, I had a sensation that I very rarely had in my life. At times, when in a place where I was under a beautiful night sky, I could focus very hard on one thing and wait for a good 10-20-30 mins and notice that it has moved through the sky. In general, Celestial Objects move/change too slow for humans to dynamically notice. That is not the case in the Eclipse: in the moments surrounding second and third contacts you can see the brightness of the Sun suddenly changing. […]

Here are some photos of that moment, as well as a video.

[…] Well, yeah I had an Astrophotography setup⁠02 It was composed by a Celestron AstroMaster 114, a small Newtonian with 1000mm focal length, F/8.77 and 114mm aperture, in a manual equatorial mount (so no tracking). I had a solar filter placed on it and a Canon EOS Rebel T3i with an eyepiece adaptor that I borrowed (thank you Mike!) I was originally planning on using that cardboard made solar filter you can see in the photo in the left being used by Daina to look at the Sun. I got that borrowed by the Astrogazers at MIT and it is a few sizes bigger than my telescope in diameter, which ofc I was aware of. What I didn’t realize is that the fact the sizes don’t match would make it impossible for the inside of the filter+telescope system to be totally dark. So it didn’t work. Fortunately, Isaac had an extra filter that can be assembled to be placed in the lenses of a camera, and the cap of my telescope has a hole in the middle that I can open in case I want a smaller amount of light entering the telescope (for example, when looking at the Full Moon) and although Isaac’s extra filter was not big enough for the diameter of my telescope, it was bigger than the middle hole of my telescope cap. There was a concern on whether the structure that holds the secondary mirror would cause weird diffraction patterns if I use the central hole but fortunately it didn’t! for the Eclipse. […] Isaac’s setup was a bit more professional⁠03 He didn’t put his camera on a telescope but he had a 300mm lenses in his camera, which was shooting automatically based on some software in his laptop, and his mount was a tracking mount. .

[…] Here are other things worth mentioning from yesterday:

• […] We were so lucky with the whole location thing. The lakeshore beach was gorgeous.
• […] I had a quintessential American experience yesterday: I had my first Lunchables. It was good! Or at least as good as it could be.

The end

That is all (I think?) […] Here’s a selfie of the crew of yesterday’s adventure.

Sincerely,  

Oris

Also, here’s the product of Isaac’s work:

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Allison ’27

When I was applying to colleges a year and a half ago, there were a lot of good reasons that I was excited about colleges in Boston, and one silly one: the 2024 solar eclipse would pass just north of the city. Four hours north, in fact. +1 pt. for MIT.

And then I got in! A sign, perhaps, that I had to see it. So I made plans to tag along with a group of friends in ESP⁠04 Educational Studies Program, a club I’m in that runs educational programs for middle and high schoolers to drive up to Vermont the day of the eclipse. We found just enough people to drive, and rented cars, and planned an itinerary, and raided Trader Joe’s for road trip snacks. There were three cars’ worth of people—for my sanity in explaining all this, let’s anthropomorphize them as Carter, Caroline, and Carina. 

Then, at 9 pm the night before April 8, the trials began:

Carina’s driver had fallen sick, and couldn’t make the trip the next morning. This was unfortunate (especially for our driver, who was now both sick and unable to see the eclipse 😭), but after some deliberation, we decided to rent out a twelve-seater van (let’s name him Vance), and Carter’s driver would drive both the passengers of both Carina and Carter to Vermont.

Very early in the morning, Carter’s driver and a valiant assistant embarked on their journey to the mystical land known as “the car rental place.” There they waited in line for our van. They waited. And they waited. And they waited some more, all for the poor, singular employee on the morning of the eclipse⁠05 seriously, this poor employee 😭 to process a massive line of people impatient to set out before traffic. When the rest of our crew arrived at our designated pickup location (outside the Student Center) at 8:15 am sharp, they were still waiting.

By the time the clock hit 9:00, we were worried, but luckily we’d found another driver! We therefore no longer really needed Vance, but unfortunately our attempts at getting access to Caroline fell through. In the wise words of one of our intrepid explorers, Fiona L. ‘27,⁠06 Fiona would like you to know that she is the coolest person ever, and because she’s provided me with this wonderful framing device, I wholeheartedly endorse this message “everything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” so we decided to rent yet another new car (Carlos) to make sure we could leave on time. In the meantime, Carter’s driver stuck it out in the original Vance line just a bit longer.

When they finally got to the front of the line, however, the car rental place had no 12-seaters. In fact, they had no cars at all for us, despite our reservation. Luckily, we were prepared—“everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” Our two drivers met to pick up Carlos, and began driving back to campus for the rest of us.

And then CARTER GOT A FLAT TIRE. I kid you not. At 9:42 am, Carter got a flat tire, and we were basically screwed. The Carter/Carlos crew worked quickly to switch to a spare, but they had to visit a repair shop before the four hour drive to Vermont. And then the first repair shop said they couldn’t fix it, so the crew had to move to a second. {Before I sent this blog to our group, I thought this shop was the one that fixed it. I have since been informed that it was not this one. Nor was it the third shop. It was, in fact, the fourth shop that could fix the tire 😭} They did the job relatively quickly, but by the time both cars made it back to campus to pick everyone up, it was 11:15 am. We had originally planned to leave at 8:15. 

“Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

But wait, there’s more! Totality would arrive in Vermont around 3:30 pm. Without traffic, the shortest drive to the path (headed to St. Johnsbury, VT) would be ~3 hours without any traffic. And it being the last total solar eclipse in the continental US for the next 20 years meant traffic. We weren’t sure if we could make it, but luckily traffic didn’t seem bad (except in a couple spots). We were staying on schedule. Life was looking good!

Then I threw up… It was in a plastic bag, thank goodness, but um… that was not a fun experience, and it also meant we had to make a pit stop that delayed us even more. Sorry to Carlos and all his other passengers 😬.

Despite this setback, however, we soldiered on. And somehow, miracle of miracles, we made it into the path of totality with 15 minutes to spare. We found the first available place to park, piled out of Carlos, and looked up at the sky (with eclipse glasses, of course). The color slowly leached out of our surroundings, the air got cooler, and then the sky went dark. Totality.

I won’t put my pictures here, mainly because they literally just show a blob, but it was incredible. I learned about solar eclipses back in 8th grade, and we were told about these two phenomena—Baily’s Beads, where the sun shines through dips in the moon’s uneven surface to make little dots of sunlight, and the red light of the sun’s chromosphere, which is only visible during eclipses. Here’s a 2017 photo from the European Space Agency of what this look like up close, if you’re curious:

I’d heard about them so many times, but I never thought they’d be visible from the naked eye—only from long exposures with professional cameras. And yet, looking up, there they were! Little dots of light and a distinct reddish outline around the edge of the sun.

Our view of totality was very brief (about 30 seconds, because we barely made it into the path of totality), but it was fascinating nonetheless.  Even more than that, though, I really loved the reactions of everyone around us watching the eclipse together. We shared eclipse glasses in the lead-up, and you could hear the murmurs crescendo into shouts and clapping as totality fell. The shared energy of humans witnessing something exciting and otherworldly was honestly just as amazing as the eclipse itself.

After seeing totality, we drove north to actually reach St. Johnsbury, and waited 35 minutes for a grocery store bathroom (bless them for having it open to the public). We started heading back to MIT around 5:00 pm, and after a couple shortcuts(?), we made it back at 10:30 pm. Not nearly as long as those who’d gone up to Newport (much further north and w/ more totality), but still quite long.

Was the trip a bit of a hot mess? Comedically so. Was it worth it? Definitely. I may have fallen behind on schoolwork (carsickness kept me from doing anything en route), and almost everything that could go wrong might’ve gone wrong, but we saw the eclipse! Besides, in the words of one of my favorite bands, AJR, “A hundred bad days made a hundred good stories.” And this was one of the better ones!

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Amber ’24

B1 planned a trip that spanned three cars, eighteen people, and an egregious number of hours inching forward through traffic. We set out at 9am — we had plans for eight, but the line in front of Budget Rental Cars was far too long. I piled into a car of seniors: Gosha, Selena, Masha (Gosha’s friend), and Claire, the only other driver, who did so far more calmly than I did.

The first three hours of driving went fine — or at least I think they did; I was asleep in the back seat. I took over around hour two. We kept passing speed traps. But as we neared New Hampshire, or Vermont, traffic slowed to a crawl. A literal crawl. For about three hours, it probably would have been faster to get out and walk. 

We’d planned to arrive at the path of totality around 2:30pm, one hour before the 1-3 minutes of totality. But traffic pushed that back. By 2:30, we were still 40 miles away and moving about 5 miles per hour. We discussed, and decided we’d pull over at 3:20, wherever we were. We didn’t expect to be where we wanted by totality.

The eclipse started at 2:30, but the light didn’t change and the traffic didn’t slow until 3. When the light shifted, people started giving up on making the path of totality and pulled off to the side. All down the highway, cars pulled to the shoulder. People poured out and climbed on the hill. 

And then the highway was empty.

I floored it. 

We raced through a light that was grey, different enough to notice, but subtle enough that on any other day I’d attribute it to an unfamiliar alignment of New England clouds, or simply to too much caffeine, and too little sleep. I pushed faster and faster. I felt the shift of gravity as we careened around curves, and the rush as I realized that one mistake would obliterate us. A few other cars were using me as coverage for speed traps and I let them pass, gave them enough distance that the highway was empty, just us and the dotted white lines blurring past.

The light faded and everyone was waiting and I was making so many decisions, my foot on the gas, hurtling onward. I thought that even if we missed the totality this was how I wanted to experience the eclipse, driving so fast on empty roads.

We pulled onto a side road at 3:26 and parked in a line of eclipse-viewers. The light was grey but unmistakeably day time. We approached the car next to us and asked, “Are we in totality? And do you have extra glasses?”

“Yes, and yes,” answered a man in his mid-twenties, with close-cut brownish hair and a patterned button-down, the quintessential Bostonian professional. He gave us extra glasses; we’d left ours in one of the other B1 cars. “I drove five hours to be right here. It better be right.”

We stepped away and disappeared into our glasses. Through them, the sun barely peeked out from behind the moon.

Then the moon moved up, and the sun was just a corona.

The eclipse itself was magical.

It was light at first in totality, then dark, like night falling all at once. It looked like true night. It was cold, and the sun behind the moon was beautiful. I understood how one could look at this and say that they had stronger gods. 

There was dead quiet on the highway, except for one car rushing back the way we’d come. He has no wonder, we said. The quiet enhanced the magic, as if the whole world stopped for this.

And then it was ending. The sun peeked out, and the dim light returned. The shadows in the crags of the rocks were so deep. For the next hour I kept looking at the landscape, trying to judge, between the adrenaline in my body and my headache and the eclipse, how real the light was, how smoky or grey. 

I’m glad I saw the eclipse. I’m glad we did. That was insane all of it.

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Ali ’26

how strange it is to be anything at all

I had lots of dreams as a kid. In particular, I had a bunch of pretty outlandish ones, like getting absurdly rich by starting a company, time travel to the year 3000, live to see myself graduate high school, and also, see a total solar eclipse. The internet told me, however, that the last dream was futile: the next eclipse—well, the next eclipse in the US at least, I didn’t really think about anywhere else—was hundreds of miles away from where I grew up. So, the eclipse dream got shelved like the others, and I became a worldly, serious woman without such silly aspirations.

My kid self didn’t realize that by the year 2024 I would be in college and mostly have the ability to go wherever I wanted. The other thing I didn’t know was that, by pure coincidence, my family would have moved across the country to Rochester, NY—which happens to be located within that tiny sliver of totality.

So, four of my friends and I crashed at my house for the weekend. We got wet on the Maid of the Mist under Niagara Falls, watched Poor Things in my living room (that one might’ve been a mistake), and we also got to see the rarest of astronomical events: the total solar eclipse, located at a sweet 12-minute walk from my house.

 

Here is my favorite eclipse fact: most of the eclipses that will ever happen are in the past. When the moon first formed, back when the earth was young and hot and hellish, it was three times as close as it is now. It looked about three times as big as it does today. Eclipses were probably… around nine times more frequent? Over the billions of years since, the moon has slowly come to its position today, as each year the moon moves an inch and a half away.

And within the next billion years, the moon will be so small that it can no longer cover the sun at all. That will be the last eclipse; we are nearly almost there. The margin is so small now that the moon is sometimes bigger than the sun, and sometimes smaller, depending on where it is in its orbit. It is coincidence beyond coincidence that there are even eclipses at all.

And also, within the next billion years, macroscopic life on Earth will end. The sun will grow ten percent brighter; the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decrease, killing the plants and presumably all the animals with them. Then the surface temperature will rise to over a hundred degrees, cooking everything in existence.

And so, most life on Earth that will ever live has probably already lived. To start with, though, life too was a coincidence beyond coincidence. The complexity of even the humblest cell is tremendous. And the fact that those single cells came together to think, to realize itself, to discover itself: that seems even less believable.

Some think that the moon was responsible for us: that the flow and ebb, the push and pull of those early tide pools was the cradle of first life. And so maybe there is a deeper link between these two coincidences. Or maybe there isn’t; trying to predict what happened millions of years ago or what will happen millions of years from now is maybe no more than just science men’s tea-leaf reading.

 

Those were the things I was thinking about, while we were sprawled out on the lawn, waiting for the eclipse to happen. Well, there ended up being just one more coincidence: the clouds were in perfect position to block out the sky completely during the eclipse. Our hard-won eclipse glasses were useless. We grumbled under the overcast sky. 

Other than an increasing chill, no change was visible at all until maybe five minutes before the eclipse. Then the sky seemed to grow a few shades darker every minute; nothing happened for a few seconds, I looked away, I looked back, the sky was darker again, and then suddenly the sky darkened completely, like God had finished playing with us and finally flipped his light switch. Thanks to the clouds, no sun was visible; no corona; no Baily’s beads; but the sky was a dark turquoise, the clouds glowed a vomit orange. Streetlamps turned on; dogs barked. It felt unnatural and eerie, like the earth had gotten terribly sick. 

And as soon as it happened, it was over. The sky began to pale, and soon enough, it was overcast again, as if nothing had happened. I’d taken my coat off to feel the authentic chill of the eclipse; I put it back on. And on the walk back, I told my mom that this all meant we were fated to see another eclipse in the rest of our short lives—one where the sky was clear, where not a single cloud would be in the sky, and everything worked out just the way it was meant to be.

 

Title from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—Neutral Milk Hotel

Facts sourced from Wikipedia

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Audrey ’24

the real eclipse was the friends we made along the way 

I chased totality with friends from my living group/frat t𝜩p. We left Boston the day before to camp out in the Green Mountains in northern Vermont. As the designated “food car,” getting everything — a lot of food, a mini grill, camping equipment, personal bags, — was a game of Tetris. Grace drove, and Winnie navigated. Ilani, Terrin, and I got to turn off our brains as the backseat crew. But, I would like to think that we pulled our weight by hugging all the stuff that couldn’t fit in the trunk. 

After five hours of losing feeling in my butt and being neck deep in stuff (which I would honestly still prefer over driving), we found a place to camp right before sunset. Grace explained that we were dispersive camping, which is when you camp outside an actual campground and therefore don’t need to pay fees. 

A thin layer of snow blanketed the ground, twinkling slightly in the fading light of the day. It was beautiful until we realized that it made keeping dry (and by extension, not getting hypothermia) harder. 

One could say that we were unprepared for dispersive camping in the snow, but one could also say that we were resourceful. Using the mini grill’s lid as a shovel, we cleared out two rectangles of snow to pitch our tents. We remembered to bring charcoal briquettes for the grill, but not lighter fluid. Winnie came in clutch with the bottle of 99% isopropyl alcohol that she usually keeps in her backpack for cleaning circuit boards, which surprisingly got the grill going strong enough to grill a whole fish. 

By then, night had fallen. We realized in the pitch black darkness that we had two headlamps for five people. But that was enough light to see that our fish was (mostly) cooked through. We dug in.  

“Woah what’s the goopy stuff?”

“Guts.”

“Oof it tastes good.”

Isn’t it wild that an ungutted fish would come with guts? It helped that Ilani thought that the fish guts had the most flavor, such that we ate pretty much every part of the fish save for the bones. Sharing a whole fish was a very familial ritual for me, as my mom would pick out the bit under the cheek as the most tender part of the fish for me to enjoy. This time, I got to be the one to pick out the cheek bit for others. 

I have only been able to gaze at a night sky untouched by light pollution a few times in my life. When we turned off our headlamps, it felt as if we were enveloped by an infinite black cloak. The temperature had dropped below freezing, but I forgot about that just for a bit. The woods, the mountains, and the sky melted into one endless expanse. Once my eyes adjusted, I still could only barely make out the silhouettes of trees faintly illuminated by starlight. 

I knew the Big Dipper and Orion, and then Grace pointed out the Little Dipper so I guess I now know that one too. 

I thought it was a firefly at first, by the way its glow darted from one corner of the sky to another. Then I realized, it was a shooting star!! I’ve seen them once before in the White Mountains a few summers ago, and I just saw my second one in the Green Mountains. Sometimes I forget that shooting stars are real. Meteors are just like the rest of us, in a hurry to get from one place to another. I’m just glad that amongst all of the possible trajectories it could’ve taken through space, it crossed mine for a brief moment. 

✨✨✨

We woke up bright and early to stuff in another hot meal, courtesy of Winnie’s grillmaster skills, and to hit the roads for Peru, a rural town in upstate New York that happened to be in the dead center of the totality path. A t𝜩p alum’s uncle owns a farmhouse there and kindly let several groups of t𝜩p alumni come over for eclipse festivities. I loved telling people that I was chasing totality in Peru without mentioning the upstate New York part. 

There should’ve been two more cars of undergrad t𝜩ps to meet up with us at Peru. But noooo, they decided that the forecasted 40% cloud cover in upstate NY was too high for them and veered off towards northern Vermont instead. (Did they not consider that they just ditched the food car??) Our car talked it over, ultimately deciding that hanging out with alumni was a big part of this trip and forging ahead with what we had planned. 

We frolicked in the farmland, caught the alums up with current t𝜩p matters, grilled potatoes, and accidentally burned potatoes down to charcoal. Someone had a fancy telescope setup whose resolution allowed you to see sunspots freckling the brilliant orange surface of the sun. I borrowed glasses to peer at the shrinking sliver of sun once in a while. But really I was most happy to be touching grass out in the middle of nowhere and taking in the warmth of the sun after sleeping outside in below freezing conditions…

Until it suddenly got chilly. The birds must’ve felt it too, taking flight in all directions. 

When the sun slipped behind the moon, a collective woah fell across the group. I felt many of the same things as I did the night before gazing at the stars. But at this moment, when the sky quickly fell into a velvety shade of dark cobalt, I was also reminded of one of my favorite novel scenes: 

“It’s just incredible. I can’t believe you’ve given me the sky to sleep under. But I can’t tell if it’s dawn or dusk you’ve painted.”

She smiled up at the ceiling. “It’s neither. It’s both. Does that unnerve you?”

from Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

It was dusk. It was dawn. It was neither, it was both in the most beautiful of ways. We were simultaneously nothing compared to the celestial bodies that just aligned and and in that moment I swear we were infinite.⁠07 from <em>The Perks of Being a Wallflower </em>by Stephen Chbosky I’m not sure if I’ve already written about this here, but I find the insignificance of my being to be more comforting than unnerving, as it means I can create significance in whatever way I choose. I tried to think about what this eclipse meant in terms of higher beings and such, but at the end of the day, the fact that I could witness all this alongside my friends bore the most significance to me. 

Also cloud cover had nothing on us. :)

🌘🌘🌘

We packed up the car as soon as dusk-dawn gave way to day. The birds went on their merry way and so did we. Rural upstate New York wasn’t too bad in terms of traffic, but we immediately hit a standstill upon crossing the border to Vermont. There was a bar/inn/convenience store (I’m not sure which one) on the side of the highway, whose owner took us gridlocked townies as a business opportunity. 

“VERMONT MAPLE SYRUP!!!! JUST [X] DOLLARS A GALLON!!!!”

“SORRY NEXT TIME!!!” we yelled back through our windows. 

Inching through traffic allowed us to take in the local scenery, which often included cows.

What did the cow say to the eclipse traffic? MOOOOOOOOOVE

It was quite obvious that the trip back would take way longer than the 5 hours it took to get there, but the question became how long. Google maps claimed there to be no traffic on the main highway we were crawling through, but the unending centipede of taillights stretching before us begged to differ. Right… there was no cell service in the middle of the Green Mountains, and Google maps pulls traffic data from people’s cell phones. 

Grace called her mom for advice on how to avoid crawling through the next 200 miles in gridlock. We could keep following Google maps, but that’s what most people are going to do. It’s worth at least checking out the back roads if they’re any better, and lo and behold they were! Again Grace pulled through with the insane driving stamina, Winnie with the navigation, and Terrin, Ilani and I with the backseat cheer crew. The drive back took 7-8 hours including rest stops, which was considered speedy compared to what I’ve heard. 

☀️☀️☀️

That was a lot. I gazed at the stars, I witnessed the flight of a meteor, and I beheld the alignment of the moon and the sun against the most brilliant of dusk-dawns. I am so so glad to have chased totality, and so so thankful for the people who I went with.