Your eclipse experience

[GandalfTheWise]

My wife and I made a quick road trip to Columbia, MO to see totality.   This worked out to be a real blessing.  We called around and found a hotel room the day before.  Didn't hit any traffic driving down (and we stayed until Tuesday so no traffic leaving).  Found a nice city park with a vacant grassy field on top of a hill a few blocks walk from the hotel.  It was pushing 100 degree heat index on Monday so stayed in the AC until it was ready to start.  We walked up to the hill and found we were the only ones up there.  We just put out our blanket in the shade under a tree and enjoyed it.   We had some eclipse glasses and brought along a cheap set of binoculars to project the image onto a piece of tagboard.

We tracked the eclipse as it got darker.  Then in the last 5 to 10 minutes before totality, the birds were singing and it seemed like twilight.  We put on our glasses and watched the last bit of light.  We took off the glasses and looked around at the 360 degree sunset/sunrise colors in all directions.  A thunderstorm has just gone past in the north so we had both clear skies to see the sunset/sunrise colors as well as clouds with the colors.  I then looked up and was able to see the halo of the sun around the moon.  It was an amazing sight.  We had a bit of high cloud cover so the moon wasn't totally dark.  We had about 2 and a half minutes to enjoy it.  The temperature also dropped to a cool level and felt comfortable.  My wife took a quick 40 second video with her phone of a 360 degree view around us.  I'll probably get that online at some point.  As it ended and the sun came back out, it was then we realized how dark it had gotten.  Some streetlights had turned on.

We both thought it was incredible.  We're now planning on a big family trip for the next one.  100% totality is an amazing experience.  Anything less is cool to see, but actually being in the zone that gets complete coverage creates a few minute experience where the environment around you just changes.  For us, it was well worth the 14 to 15 total hours of driving.  It was also a nice relaxing road trip for just the two of us.