Question For Eclipse Totality Veterans

[WEDWDW]

I'm on the fence. Driving 7 -8 hours....probably not. But then I saw the Grand Canyon (yup, hole in the ground), Hoover Dam (yup, big dam) and Niagara (yep, big falls). The Eclipse is kind of like that. Cool, awesome, bucket list...but kind of like a checkbox.

The more I think about it the more I think I would have your reaction.

I had the same reaction to seeing the things you mentioned plus so many more breathtaking things like Sunrises and Sunsets,Deserts,Mountains,major Concerts,major Sporting Events,even the first time I laid eyes on Walt Disney World.

I loved seeing all of those things and some made me very emotional but not to the point of comparing them to Child Birth!lol

And I never put the "Greatest Thing I Have Seen In My Life" "tag" on any one of those things.

So my best guess is I would be very,very impressed and very,very glad I saw it,but that I would not walk away saying if I had not seen that my life would have been incomplete.

But the only way to know for sure is to see one of those suckers!

G'day Mate.

 

[TiggerTrigger]

Our home was in the path of totality so we didn't have to travel, but we only had 1 minute 45 seconds of totality. If we'd been near the center line it would have been almost 4 minutes. I thought 1 min 45 seconds would be "plenty" to see what there was to see, but it was not. I was not ready for it to be over.

Duration of totality became one of my great debates over where to travel. If I drove about 2.25 hours, I'd get about a minute of totality. If I drove another 7 minutes, I'd get close to 2.5 minutes. If I was willing to drive another 44 minutes, I'd have nearly 4.5 minutes of totality. A longer totality can even give you a chance of seeing something under scattered clouds. Still, if I could see it from my backyard, there's a lot to be said for the comfort of home.

 

[TiggerTrigger]

I mean, you also have the possibility of flying to Australia and having it be cloudy. It’s a chance you’ll have to decide you want to take.

Most of the people planning major travel for these things also build in a lot of flexibility and are prepared to pivot several times before locking in place and accepting whatever they get. For this past Monday's, people were shifting air travel up until a day or two out and made several shifts on the ground right up through the morning of the 8th. I know I packed up and shifted 40 miles to the northeast based on the morning cloud cover. The mixed forecasts and mass shifting was evidenced in the hotel availability and dipping prices. Some areas are also better, especially at different times of year, for cloud cover than others. Still no guarantees, but you can certainly work to improve your odds.

 

[design_mom]

However, they'll still be in Australia. So even if the eclipse goes badly, they'll have lots of other exciting things to do. (I thought maybe a midwinter eclipse in Oz would be cloudy, but I read somewhere that July is usually clear.)

Most of the people planning major travel for these things also build in a lot of flexibility and are prepared to pivot several times before locking in place and accepting whatever they get.

Oh, I agree. I'd love to go to Australia and if I could see an eclipse as part of it, that'd be icing on the cake. I was responding to what the OP said here:

I would hate to fly all the way to Australia and have the same reaction!lol

The "same reaction" the OP was worried about was a "meh... I'm hard to impress" kind of reaction. And yes, it's possible that the OP would get to Australia and think "meh, the eclipse isn't as cool as everyone said" (My 23 year old wasn't impressed, but the rest of us were. He's just "like that.") It's also possible there could be widespread clouds/storms on the day of the eclipse and it might not be visible at all. So...hopefully the eclipse would be a super-cool PART of an already cool trip, but not whole reason she's going. Because that puts a WHOLE lot of pressure on something that lasts a couple of minutes, is weather dependent, and is really kind of subjective.

 

[bsmcneil]

Do you think the comparison to watching Child Birth is legitimate?

I just can't wrap my head around that comparison,but I have never seen Totality.

Oh man, I had a whole thing typed and lost it. Anyway, I was going to say - it's not the language I would use/choose (comparable to child birth) but I do think it's apt in a way (given the rarity of the events and the sort of foundational/human level - few things get more basic than the sun and life itself). With the birth of your kid (I guess I was assuming it was my child not any child birth), there's so much building up to it and I didn't find that to be the case with the eclipse (and for what it's worth, there is more I can do to have an active role in the creation of being present for the birth of my child than a solar eclipse - so, you're just reliant on the universe to do its thing there). In terms of purely natural experiences, it probably ranks as the highest one (over, for instance, sunrise at Arches National Park). I haven't personally witnessed a volcano explosion - but even being amidst the steam at Volcanoes National Park was pretty cool.

In terms of other things, this probably ranks below childbirth and beside being in a really important place on a special night that will go down in history (akin to being at the Berlin Wall when it fell - I'm trying to find an analogous thing without sharing what I did to avoid tainting it's importance with people's feelings about it). That said, I was so in the path of totality that we just walked outside to our front yard (and things are pretty clear here, so there weren't trees or anything).

Traveling to see it could've made it feel more special (we did have a picnic) and/or less so (traffic, stress, what if there had been bad weather, etc). We also had 4 minutes (I think 4m5s) and I could imagine it feeling cool at 1m30s and possibly not long enough (or that 4m was too long - I think my kids started getting bored though I didn't). It all sort of depends on what your style is. If I were to travel to see a total eclipse, I'd want (as others have said) to make sure I already wanted to go there - but it's also my style that I would want to go somewhere more of a natural setting (Stonehenge, a national park) than not and/or not around people (I saw 50K went to the Indianapolis Speedway and I can't, for the life of me, figure out why that sounded fun). Someone in our city shot off fireworks (we could hear them but not see them from our house) and I couldn't figure out why we'd take something majestic and mess with it.