Let's Hear Your Eclipse Stories
Here's mine.
We’re finally back home after an epic eclipse spring break trip. We drove from our home in New York’s Hudson Valley to Niagara Falls, then stopped in Toronto for a few days. We drove back to a nature preserve near Niagara Falls to get in the zone of totality and watch the eclipse.
Although our drive on eclipse day was only 80 miles, we were so terrified of getting caught in traffic that we left our Airbnb at 8am. We packed our car with a loaf of bread, jars of peanut butter and jelly, and bottled water just in case things got crazy. Apparently, some 200,000 people traveled from Toronto to Niagara Falls to watch the eclipse; the Toronto mayor called it the “biggest one-day event in Niagara Falls history.”
But we were fine. Like, embarrassingly fine. Our journey from Toronto to Niagara took less than two hours, so then we had five hours to kill. Thankfully, we found some outlet stores. (I have never put “thankfully” and “outlet stores” in the same sentence, and I doubt I ever will again.) After lunch, we headed to the preserve, which was adorable. It had a playground, climbing walls, even mini-golf. We got to play a round before we settled down to wait for the moon and sun to find each other.
The eclipse was magnificent. I didn’t have high expectations because the forecast involved nothing but clouds. But by some miracle, about an hour before totality arrived, the clouds started to break up and we had a few patches of sunshine through which we could observe the partial eclipse. Every time the sun became visible, even if just for a second, a chorus of voices in the preserve yelled “I see it!!!!!” and everyone else rushed to put on their eclipse glasses hoping to catch a glimpse before the sun disappeared again.
By far the strangest, most epic moments were the minutes surrounding totality. About ten minutes before, the light shifted. It didn’t just get darker — everything took on a weird pinkish purple hue. The temperature suddenly dropped. The atmosphere became surreal and eerie. As Annie Dillard has written, “A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane.”
Suddenly the world was pitch black, save for the light glow of the totality’s horizon in the distance. The people around us were shrieking, but other animals were silent. (When we observed the 2017 eclipse, I remember dogs barking during totality — this time, the dogs went very quiet.) We took off our eclipse glasses and peered into the cloudy sky hoping to see the sun’s corona, and we were quickly rewarded with about 30 seconds of the shimmering eclipsed sun. It felt miraculous, given that the sky all day had been blanketed with grey. Everyone around us lost their minds.
Then, just as quickly as it started, totality ended. The atmosphere rapidly grew lighter and warmer, as if we were experiencing a sunrise on steroids. It was so odd to suddenly be back in a “normal day.” How could day turn to night and then back to day again in the span of five minutes? It was impossible to wrap my head around.
Now, I don’t want to mislead you and make you think that the day was total perfection. Afterwards, there was traffic. And in the 15 minutes preceding totality, my 12-year-old grew increasingly agitated because he couldn’t figure out how to use his eclipse glasses. The thing about eclipse glasses is that they block out everything but the sun — if you look around while wearing them, it’s like you’re looking through a blindfold — and because the sun was mostly hidden behind clouds, he couldn’t see anything and he thought his glasses didn’t work. There was a lot of anxious, panicked yelling. I mean, I get it; he was worried he would miss the eclipse entirely, which would have been very frustrating!
Once I was able to convince him to keep his glasses on long enough to catch a moment when the clouds parted, he saw the eclipsed sun and lost his mind, but this time in a good way. By time totality arrived, he was poised and ready for it. But for a few minutes, we were just a couple of panicked shrieks away from a total meltdown. This happy story, in other words, could have ended very differently.
Did you observe the partial or total eclipse? What did you think? How did your kids react? Share in the comments!
We live in Massachusetts but my 10 y.o. and I went to Vermont where we met up with my cousin and her family, who rented a house up there. They live in Wyoming and were in the path of totality for the last one, and she insisted it was a "life-changing experience" and wanted to come out here for this one. She was completely right! We looked at a map and found a small town about an hour from where we were staying to try to ensure less cloud cover and two more minutes of totality, and on the drive out there we saw so many people barbecuing in their yards, setting up camp chairs, kids setting up lemonade stands, and just general excitement. We set up a blanket and chairs in a totally empty soccer field and it just soaked up the cosmic-ness of it all. If you've read The Phantom Tollbooth, it made me think about the chapter where Milo decides to conduct the sunrise and everything goes sideways.
10 y.o. was totally in awe and couldn't stop talking about how cool it was.
On the parenting front, it was also great because I also have 6 y.o. twins who are wonderful but just take up a lot of emotional/physical/aural space (they stayed home with dad) and it was nice to do something with just him. He also loooooved being with my cousin's teens and do "big kid" stuff. The traffic was bad just trying to get back to our rental house so I scrapped our original plan to drive home that night (which was good, because I had co-workers that said it took them 13 hours to do what would normally be a 3.5 hour drive!!) and got up at 5am the next day instead and THAT - just me with one sleeping kid in the car, watching the sunrise over the mountains, listening to music - was also amazing. I'm still on a high from the whole thing and being part of such a huge collective experience.
We were in the path of totality in Vermont. It lives up to the cliches of being a life changing thing to see. It was crazy to feel it start to get gradually colder, the light take on a weird vibe like a bad Instagram filter, and then become dusk instantaneously. We also stayed up north so luckily we didn't hit too bad of traffic on the way back to our hotel. It was gridlock to get out of the town, but once we hit the highway, it was pretty smooth sailing. Had we been trying to go back home though, we would have sat in some brutal traffic.