So yesterday was the MUCH-anticipated "Great American Eclipse", the first of its kind since 1918. The excitement was certainly building as the day drew closer, with stores selling out of eclipse glasses and millions of people predicted to flock to areas of 'totality', which as you can see on the map, wasn't but an hour or so from Wellsville -- lucky us!
We got our glasses from Price Chopper and the elementary school, which had a pair for each student (Thanks, Grandma Cheryl, for picking them up for us!).
But we decided the 99% seen from Wellsville just wasn't good enough for us as we wanted TOTALITY. I read an article that compared even 99.9% to driving within a mile of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Ah, that's good enough!" With totality predicted to happen about 1:00 p.m., Russ picked the boys up from school at 10:00 and then came to Lawrence to get me from work (Thanks to my great co-workers for letting me work a half day!), and we headed north. The crowds expected in cities like St. Joseph and Atchison had us kind of freaked out, so we stuck to country roads and found a great spot surrounded by bean fields in north Jefferson County. Glasses on, ready to see some eclipse action!
I put an app on my phone which kept us updated with all of the important times. C1 at 11:39 and totality occuring at 1:06 for one minute, 4 seconds. Here we go!
To answer the question on our special-event cups, we were a few miles north of Winchester, KS, on a peaceful country road with no crowds and no traffic -- just like we like it! As their water tower says, we did "Win" with this location!
So the back story on this day was the threat of storms and heavy cloud cover which would put a severe damper on the event. After all, it's kind of hard to appreciate a solar eclipse with no sun. With the eclipse beginning nearly an hour and a half before totality, it actually was kind of fun to "find" the eclipse in amongst the clouds. How boring to just sit and watch a constant sun! And this way was much safer on the eyes, I'm sure. We met up with Grandpa Denny and Grandma Jo for our own little private watch party.
There were times when the clouds were so thick we couldn't see anything, but Evelyn still thought it was fun to look through Grandpa's welding mask.
So if there had been no clouds, this is what we would have seen through our glasses. . .
. . . but instead we saw these equally-cool images of the sun through the clouds as the moon eclipsed it.
It was actually raining with thick dark clouds covering the entire sky about 15 minutes before totality, and we were getting a little nervous about our chances of seeing the Main Event of the day.
But then, miraculously, God gave us the perfect size window in the clouds to watch the "diamond ring" and the "Bailey's Beads" as totality came up us! The purple sparkles all around the circumference of the eclipse were so beautiful!
And the 360 degree sunset was gorgeous as well. So many cool things to watch at once! I just wish it could have lasted longer than a minute!
What an amazing experience with my family!
We celebrated on the ride home by stopping at Sonic for some happy hour drinks in our eclipse cups.
Violet stayed at school because I knew she wouldn't really care about the eclipse and I was nervous about her keeping her glasses on. She did some fun activities for the day while she was there. Thankfully, she survived the Solar Eclipse of 2017!
It was such an awesome experience, my boys are already talking about the NEXT eclipse. There will actually be another one coming through southeast Missouri and most of Arkansas about a month before Calvin will graduate from high school (April 8, 2024). Russ thinks this sounds like a great guys trip to celebrate his graduation!
Events like this make me truly marvel at God's creation and how he orchestrates everything so perfectly. It was a spectacular sight to see, and I'm so thankful that I had the opportunity to experience the Great American Eclipse 2017!
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