In 1998, having just seen the eclipse in Antigua, we started looking for "the next one".
2017 was completely obvious; we went to Bend, Oregon, because it's a desert and it was in August and the number of clouds expected were like minus one.
I thought 2024 would be completely obvious as well, it seemed like Mazatlan, Mexico was the place to go. My partner Valerie had spoken of her trips to Mazatlan in the 1980s, which sounded like fun. However, after 40 years passed, there were some problems involving drug cartels. We did not want to get kidnapped or shot. So the next obvious place is Texas. (Where you can still get shot, but perhaps less likely?)
We chose Glen Rose because it was not too far from Dallas, and had some interesting tourist options. They turned out to be really cool. We had been concerned that this trip would not meet the eclipse trip criteria "it would be a good trip even if the eclipse was a washout", but it seemed like we were successful in that this time. And we also saw the eclipse.
We started with a rental car disaster; we had booked a Turo (AirB&B for cars), and the previous person who had the car didn't return it, and so it wasn't available when we landed. Turo came through and found us a car -- our choice to fly to a large airport in a large metropolitan area probably helped us win in this case -- but the car was a lemon. There were a number of things wrong with it, including the lamp over the license plate being burned out, which caused the local constabulary to pull me over. Fortunately they decided not to give me a ticket. And none of the rest of my driving was at night so I didn't have to worry about that again.
The rest of the trip was great. Our AirB&B was perfect. We had arrived such that we had a free day before eclipse day, so we got in our lousy car and went to Dinosaur Valley State Park in the morning and Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in the afternoon.
Dinosaur Valley State Park has a river flowing through it, whose riverbed has dinosaur tracks just sitting there for the looking. They were created by the usual dinosaur steps in the mud, and the mud hardens, and new mud comes and fills in the tracks, and everything gets compressed and turns to rock, and the newer rock turns out to be softer than the older rock, and the newer rock erodes, leaving behind tracks in the rock. We thought they could've done a better job of signage about exactly where to look, but there were enough other tourists saying ooh ah that you could just go where they were and say ooh ah yourself. They also could've done a little bit better job of the visitor center with the replicas of this and that, but it was pretty good. And it was totally cool to put your foot inside a place where there was a dinosaur track. We were lucky, because sometimes the river is too high or too murky and the tracks are not visible. We did not go to all of the viewing sites; there are six or seven and we went to three of them. I have pictures from two of them (the third was less interesting).
Back to the house for lunch, and then off to Fossil Rim. This is the inverted zoo model, where the animals are out in pastures and you are in your car or a bus. Being in your car is cheaper, but being in a bus gets a naturalist who tells you all about it. Our naturalist was awesome, and really knew her stuff. Also, being in the bus gets you on the little dirt roads that the cars aren't allowed on so you get closer to some of the animals, and more interaction. They make the usual fuss about "natural behavior", but that is just a complete lie. In particular, they give you little cups of food pellets that you can toss to the various ruminants, and the giraffes are fed lettuce, and they will take it from your hand. The emus and ostriches will come right up to the bus, and eat the little pellets off of the edge of the bus.
Some of the animals are inside enclosures that you don't go in, and this is probably a good idea for the cheetahs, because you might be the food pellet for a cheetah. Also, rhinos are very big and that might be scary up close.
The next day was eclipse day. By this time Jocelyn and her (ex?) boyfriend had joined us; they missed the prior day's activities. The weather forecast was iffy, so we spent a lot of time staring at the sky, guessing how fast the clouds were going and whether we would need to jump in our cars to look for a clear patch. We lined them up in the driveway facing out so we'd be able to do that in a hurry if we felt it was necessary. The partial eclipse was about an hour and 20 minutes, so we had a lot of time to play with shadows, and get our binoculars set up and so forth. Before totality, we were able to see sunspots through the binoculars (with their filters on of course). The neighbors came over and said "you look like you know what you're doing" and asked some questions, which we cheerfully answered.
In the end, the clouds kind of went away. Possibly because colder air holds less moisture, and so as the penumbral shadow deepened and the air cooled (which it did, though not as dramatically as in Oregon), the clouds dissipated a bit. Cheers all around! We were not on centerline, but we still got over three minutes. I had set an alarm for 10 seconds before the end of totality, and Ken had set an alarm for three seconds before the end of totality, so we could pop the filters back on top of the binoculars, mostly, but also so we would be prepared to look away as soon as the sun started to come back out. I briefly saw a nice diamond ring again.
There were a lot of pink prominences, some of which were kind of naked eye visible, but which of course looked better in the binoculars. (We actually had a second pair of binoculars that didn't have any filters, so we couldn't use them until totality, and then we completely forgot about them so nobody looked through them.) Elsewhere in the sky, Jupiter and Venus were easy to see, and if you looked carefully, Mars and Saturn were also visible, but we needed to know where to look. I could even tell that Mars was redder than Saturn.
We don't have any official eclipse glasses, because in 1991 before the eclipse in Hawaii we bought some rectangular glass filters. We also bought a cheap welders goggles, and swapped the glass from it for one of the solar filters. This turns out to be really great, because it makes it dark inside, and so the filter, which otherwise acts as a mirror, really gives you a good view. It kind of makes you look like you are wearing a VR headset. But that and the existence of "Google cardboard" inspired me to try to make one out of cardboard. It wasn't as good as the welders set up, but it worked pretty well, better than the handheld bare piece of glass. We passed all these back and forth during partiality so everyone got a good look whenever they wanted.
Our flight wasn't until 4pm the next day, so originally I thought we would stop in Dallas and do something brief, maybe see the Kennedy assassination memorial or something, but because of the Turo car issue we had to return it to a place where that would be inconvenient, and it had commenced to rain, so we just chilled in the house before heading back to Dallas.
But where to next? I'll be pretty old in 2045!
Unfortunately, while eclipses actually happen fairly often, a lot
of them are hard to see, this XKCD shows that:
There are dinosaur statues at the entry to the park, and somebody had made oversized eclipse glasses for them
Two dinosaur tracks at the "ballroom" site where we were wading (and a shadow of person holding phone taking pictures).
A number of dinosaur tracks at the "main site", where there was a roped off area for viewing
Close-up of track at "main site"
An aoudad, with a fallow deer following. The fallow deer were everywhere and kind of a scourge; they knew best that the bus was a food truck.
Mommy and baby white rhinoceros, baby is nursing.
Daddy white rhinoceros, fresh from having wallowed in the mud.
An emu. Here's looking at you kid.
Emus ate from the edge of the bus for us. One guy got his finger bit!
(No real damage done.)
Hartmann's Mountain Zebra. They were uninterested in the bus.
Arabian oryx, with roan in the background. Or maybe they are sable antelopes.
Giraffe taking lettuce from a passenger's hand. In the background is the lineup of private cars which went through the park. I was glad to be on the bus.
Tree shadows during eclipse partiality.
Colander images during eclipse partiality.
Diamond Ring, captured by Jocelyn's guest.
Our eclipse "goggles" and a plain filter. I did not plan the "limited edition" placement from the Cheerios box; it was a lucky accident.
