Monday: April 8
Waco,Eclipse Day!
I slept fine for the first half of the night. I had a minor sleep disturbance and wondered if it was close to the time to get up. It was just past midnight! I fell asleep fairly easily after that. Then I had a more major sleep disruption about 2 or 2:30. That took me a lot longer to return to sleep, and after that I just dozed lightly until the alarm went off.
We went downstairs at 6:50 and found that the breakfast room was ... completely empty. While we waited, we talked to another couple that had happened upon an eclipse party the night before. It was at some large bridge near the hotel, and they were flying a lot of synchronized lighted drones. Her pictures looked wonderful. Apparently all of Waco knew about this, but our tour organizers did not. It would have been nice to have seen it.
Just about at 7, they started bringing food out to the breakfast room. After a bit, people started lining up to get at the food. I took a look inside the room, and it looked just like pastries and fruit. I figured that this was going to be a poor “continental” breakfast, so Amy and I bailed from the line and went over to the main desk where we could order some hot food from their kitchen. It was nothing great—a typical egg/sausage sandwich or some sort of breakfast burrito. We were just about to pay for it (you ordered it and paid for it, and then they prepared it for you), when Amy noticed them bringing a cart of these things to the breakfast room. So we canceled our order and got back in line. Of course, we ended up moving from about halfway back to the very end.
After scarfing down breakfast, we went up to the room, took care of last minute details, and then went down to board the busses at 8:00. I don’t know why they had the busses so early. The eclipse wasn’t until the afternoon, and the place was only about 20 minutes away. We rushed over there apparently so that we could spend 3 hours being bored out of our wits.
There were two busses, and Amy and I were the first people to not get on the first bus. John and Pam had, however. On the flip side, were the first to get on the second bus.
The “Equestrian Center” was about as I pictured, but a bit greener. There was a large field, a bunch of hay bales, some porta-potties, and one or two tiny trees. We claimed a pair of hay bales, set up the cameras, and killed time. I wandered around a bit taking a few pictures of the wild flowers.
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The day started out totally overcast. By the time we were getting set up in the field, the sun was peeking through holes in the clouds. I figured that this was the best we could hope for, that totality would peek out an appropriate hole, and we would see something.
We went for lunch around 11:30 to beat the rush, and we found that we were already sort of too late. The people who live there and run the place were making and selling sandwiches. When we got there, we found the BBQ chicken sandwiches were already gone, so it was a choice between a veggie plate and a pulled pork sandwiches. There were currently no sandwiches, but they were making it in their kitchen, and there should be more in about 10-15 minutes.
The people serving the food were very nice—full of what you might call Southern Charm or Southern Hospitality, but they were terribly disorganized. Some people paid first, and then waited for the sandwiches to be made, and others got their sandwiches and then paid. There was really no way to distinguish one case from the other, so they essentially were relying on people being honest and paying for their food.
I was a bit disappointed in the sandwich that the girl made for me. I thought that there was a particularly small amount of pulled pork on the bun. I got one with pickles, and I was joking to myself that instead of getting a pulled pork sandwich flavored with pickles, I was getting a pickle sandwich flavored with pulled pork. I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to ask for more meat however. I think that perhaps she thought the pan was getting low and trying to reduce the portion size to make it go further. In any event, it worked out OK for me, in that Amy couldn’t finish hers, so I ate mine and half of hers.
There was really no good place to eat, so I started heading back to our hay bale. Halfway back, I saw some people sitting on the ground in the shade at the side of the bus, so I jointed them, using the bus as a back rest. Amy joined me. We saw John and Pam heading back some distance away. We shouted and waved, and I sent John a text, but they never noticed us and continued on to the hay bale.
Shortly after we finished lunch, first contact occurred. That is the start of the partial phase of the eclipse. That is, between first and second contact, the sun becomes more and more of a crescent. At this point, the sun was going in and out of the clouds. It would pop out, I would take a few pictures, and it would pop back in again. I was just hoping that the totality would be while it was “popped out” and not “popped in”.
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Amy set up “her camera”, which was actually Sam’s camera body and my second longest lens. It worked fine when we tested it back home, but for some reason, this time it was complaining that there was some issue with the SD card. I tried reformatting it, but that didn’t work. We borrowed a spare SD card from John, and with that, Amy was able to take some pictures.
Strangely enough, the sun popped out from behind the clouds a few minutes before second contact, and it stayed out essentially until the end of the eclipse! I couldn’t believe how fortunate we were. I had been expecting to see nothing, or at best to see a quick glimpse of the middle of totality, but we got to see the whole thing. That was hoped for but unexpected.
I was very disorganized. I ended up taking a lot of pictures at various random exposures. I have no idea if any or many came out OK.
At one point, I stopped taking pictures and looked at it with some binoculars. That was pretty neat.
I would say that the lighting was dim, but it wasn’t as dark as night would be. We did see a planet to the right of the sun. I think it was either Saturn or Jupiter. I could also see a neat red solar flare at about 5:00 on the sun. I did a quick check of some of my pictures, and I think I got at least a few that show the flare.
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Unfortunately, Amy forgot to take off her filter during totality, so she couldn’t see anything of the sun during totality.
John tried an experiment of pointing his iPhone up and doing a time-lapse video. It was rather interesting. I was afraid of trying that myself for fear of frying my camera’s sensors, but it apparently didn’t hurt his. You can clearly see the clouds clearing just before totality in his video.
It was a fairly long eclipse—more than 4 minutes. Eventually we reached third contact, the sun came back out, the filters went back on, and totality was finished. The die-hards were still taking pictures until the end (fourth contact), but the partial is not even close to as interesting as totality, so we just packed our stuff up and got on the bus.
Once again, I was blessed with good fortune. Just before we packed up to head back to the bus, I was talking with John, and I happened to glance down and I saw something round and plastic about two inches next to his foot. I said, “What’s that?” He picked it up, and it turns out to be an earbud. More particularly, it turns out that it was one of my earbuds. If he hadn’t been standing there, and if I hadn’t glanced down at the ground, I would never have noticed it. I would have gotten on the bus, returned to the hotel, and probably not noticed that I was missing one until the next time I went to the gym.
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We really lucked out with the weather. After 4th contact, everyone packed up, got on the bus, and we headed back to the hotel. I looked outside, and it was solid overcast again. It seemed like if the totality was an hour earlier or an hour later, we would have seen little to nothing. I’m not sure if this was a very fortunate coincidence, or whether the cooling effects of the partial phase may have caused the clouds to briefly dissipate.
I need to see how my photos came out when I upload them onto my computer with the big monitors. Particularly if my photos come out so so, I think that next time I might forego the photos and just sit back, view it, and enjoy the experience.
We got back to the hotel around 3:30. I brought my stuff up to the room, and then immediately set out on my quest (to look for Amy's missing hat). We had tried calling the restaurant to see if they had her hat, but I could never talk to a real person, and my message was not answered. So I set out to pay them a visit and see if they had Amy’s hat.
Just as I was leaving the building, it dawned on me that I should bring rain gear with me. But there were a lot of people trying to go up the elevators, and I didn’t want to spend the time to go up and get some. Apparently the stairs function as a fire escape, but you can’t use them to normally go between floors. So I figured I would take my chances with getting wet. It turns out that Milo’s is about 0.6 miles away, and about an 8-9 minute fast walk.
I got there just after 4:00, and I was surprised to find that their door was locked! I checked the sign, and I found out that they were closed from 3 to 5. I really didn’t feel like waiting around for 45 minutes, so I planned to walk back and then repeat the round trip a half hour later.
So as not to completely waste the trip, I went next door and got a small milk shake for the walk back (and to share with Amy). I ended up testing the abilities of the teenage girl taking my order. The total came out to $7.04. I had $6 in bills, and I got from my pocket 3 quarters and 3 dimes. I handed it to her, and I could see her counting out the coins and trying to figure out how much I had given her. Eventually, she said that I had given her $7, and the total was $7.05. I pointed out that the thirty cents plus the 75 cents came out to $1.05, so the total that I had given her was $7.05. She looked at the money a bit, and either re-did the math in her head or just took my word for it, and gave me back my penny in change. I was thinking to myself, “Don’t they teach kids how to add these days???”
I walked back, gave Amy the rest of the milkshake (some had disappeared as I was walking back), and wrote some of this up. Then about 4:55 I set out on my quest again. This time, as one would expect, they were open, and they had the hat up by the register. I then returned, gave the hat to Amy, and continued writing up my narrative. At this point, I was getting very familiar with that stretch of road, having by then done it three times all the way, and parts of it four times over the previous 30 hours.
I couldn’t write much more, because I wanted to take a shower before we went to dinner. Learning my lesson from the previous day, I hadn’t taken a shower in the morning, figuring that I would need to do so after spending the day in the sun, and because we had a somewhat rushed morning.
Just as I was about to go into the shower, I heard a loud deep rumble of thunder. By the time I got out of the shower, it was totally pouring out. I was again very lucky that it had held off until I returned with the hat.
We had been planning to walk to dinner, but none of us wanted to walk a long distance with that much water falling out of the sky. Fortunately, the hotel offered a free shuttle van to within 5 miles of the hotel, on a first-come first-served basis. Our reservations were for 6:30, so we decided to go down at 6 and try to get the van. I took my backpack with a warmer shirt, some rain gear, and my iPad, so that I could write more up if we had a long wait.
They have some sort of gas-fed fire pit thing next to the pool outside. It seems to be sort of an eternal flame as it seems to always be burning. However, when we got down to the lobby, I saw that it was out. It actually looked very sad. Instead of the cheery little flames, it was soaked and dark, with wisps of smoke curling up from it. It looked very bedraggled and unhappy.
The van was just returning from a trip, and there was a group ahead of us, so I thought that we were told that we could have the van after this group was finished. So I pulled out my iPad to start writing. Then it appeared that we could share the van, and have it drop both of our parties off at the same time. So I had to quickly put the iPad away, get my raincoat on, and scurry out to the van. We got to the restaurant slightly early, but they had no problems seating us.
It wasn’t a fancy place, but it was apparently popular with the locals. The food was pretty good, and the only real downside was that it was rather noisy, particularly when they turned up the volume of a baseball game featuring the local team.
Amy got liver, which she particularly enjoys, and this time it rather agreed with her stomach. She brought a “to go” bag back to the hotel afterwards, and this time she actually ate it later in the evening.
After dinner, the rain had stopped, but we didn’t want to take our chances, so Pam called the hotel and ordered us the van again. It came by about 10 minutes later, and took us back to the hotel. Amy wanted more of the frozen custard for desert, so as it wasn’t raining, we walked over and got some cones in essentially a repeat of the previous evening. By the time we had finished our cones, it was drizzling lightly, but it wasn’t bad, and it actually seemed to end about halfway back to the hotel. Once again, we passed a statue of a mommy bear protecting her cub from an apparently aggressive male bear.
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Tomorrow morning should be rather mellow. The bus leaves at 10. Breakfast should be at 8 or 8:30, so we can sleep in and not rush. There is an earlier bus going on an extension. Those poor slobs leave at 7, so they arranged for their breakfast to start at 6am!