totality

I will admit that I was a little anxious about whether we were going to find a place to watch the eclipse. This is because the entirety of our plan was "drive into the zone, preferable somewhere remote."

Only we don't live somewhere remote, and the stories of the projected traffic struck fear into the heart of a person who commutes 2+ hours a day. The idea of more time in the car, stuck in traffic, made me feel slightly ill. I tried to talk the rest of the team into leaving earlier or making a more concrete plan, but everyone else thought it would be fine.

Sunday afternoon, we packed up the Subaru with tents and all the camping gear, and off we set.

Just inside the national forest, we stopped at a ranger station, where they gave us a map with the non-reservable sites highlighted, and then we just guessed. We picked a campground and drove.

When we drove into the campground we'd chosen, there were empty spots. There was even, upon inspection, a big, quiet spot down a little trail next to the creek, with two tables and space for multiple tents. We couldn't even hear our nearest neighbors. 

The guys took the tiny hatchet that I gave J. for his birthday and used it to hack at a fallen tree to break off pieces for firewood, and then JT took the hatchet from them and crouched down, holding it in both hands, and chipped away until she broke off a piece. 

In the morning, we lounged about making breakfast. There were eggs on the stove.

Jeff put on the eclipse glasses just to see how they worked, and suddenly said, "It's already happening!" 

We turned off the eggs, scrambled around for chairs and the rest of the eclipse glasses, and looked up.

There was a bite out of the sun. 

We all sat for the next forty five minutes, looking up, enthralled. 

When the sun disappeared through the glasses, we all tentatively took them off, and then we couldn't help ourselves. We whooped and shouted. We laughed. 

"The world is divided into two kinds of people," JT said, after the light had returned. "People who have seen totality, and people who haven't."

"Totality or bust."

We're already planning for Mexico in 2024.