Going to see an eclipse is like going to the Olympics. You plan for literally years to be at a specific place at a specific time, and the thing you're there for lasts only a few minutes or seconds. Not only that--it might go spectacularly well, or fall short by just that much, and either way, it's going to be one of the big defining moments of your life.
Oh, and the town where this is all happening fills up with more people than have gone through in the last hundred years combined.
The hotel room I was able to get was in Junction City, Kansas, about an hour and a half drive from the border with Nebraska. The main feature of this town is a military base; when I mentioned to someone on the plane that I was staying there, they asked if I had military connections. On Sunday, one of the locals asked if I'd gone to the Saturday concert at the base--I hadn't, and she said I'd been smart to avoid it because of the heat.
As Monday approached, I checked Google Maps and weather.com obsessively, but I was actually about as afraid of traffic as I was of the clouds. I had a good rental car, but I don't drive often and really didn't want to have to do so on a busy road. So I compiled a list of tiny (tiny!) towns along the west-to-east swath of totality. I planned to drive to the one most directly north, and then check the weather and go east or west depending on which way would have clearer skies.
I tried to sleep a little on Sunday night, but it was no use; I couldn't calm down enough to do it. I started driving at midnight.
My first stop was the appropriately tiny town of Wymore, Nebraska. There were signs out proclaiming a free pulled pork lunch at the local viewing event. I parked in a quiet, out-of-the-way place, and then discovered that my phone wasn't getting data. My GPS route had pre-populated the route I was driving, but I couldn't get anything new, so no weather reports. That cramped my style, so I decided to head just a little farther north to Beatrice (the locals pronounced it "be-AT-riss"), which is a more respectably-sized town. As I drove, I saw lightning up in the clouds to the northeast, but I could also see patches of stars, so I still felt hopeful for good weather. Thing is, Beatrice didn't have data either. Feeling rather stuck at 2 AM, I slept in the car.
The next morning, I bought a map at the nearby gas station, and learned from the owner that Verizon gets good data coverage in the area. That didn't help me (Credo Mobile), so I got some breakfast at the local open-early doughnut place and resolved to just stay in Beatrice. This was such a dedicated little doughnut shop that they did not even serve hot tea--only coffee.
It turned out that the thing everyone was doing was getting on free shuttle buses to the Homestead National Monument. So I decided to just throw my hat in with them, and if it was cloudy, we'd all suffer together.
People arrived all morning, a busload at a time. The whole monument was open, showing the usual historical exhibits. NASA had a tent, and a representative giving a slideshow about what kinds of phenomena we might see. PBS Kids took on the duty of handing out eclipse glasses. There were food trucks--with really tasty hot dogs and shaved ice--and a whole row of porta-potties. Some sections had been roped off as "Reserved for Telescopes", but most of us "casuals" gathered in chairs in front of the big stage, where presenters talked about the eclipse and the monument, and a few bands played. The bands were mostly focused on the children, who probably needed the most help being patient.
Meanwhile, the clouds rolled by. At first, it seemed they'd avoid us, but as first contact approached, lots of heavy clouds steadily blew over us. Every once in a while there was a gap, and whenever we could see our shadows we all put our glasses on and looked up. I'd brought some binoculars with solar filters, but they were a little less useful than I'd hoped because even a thin film of clouds made them impossible to see through. When they did work, I could see a couple tiny sunspots.
The real celebrity star power showed up when Bill Nye arrived on stage and was interviewed with some other astronomy experts. The clouds kept up their march, escalating to a few spells of actual rain.
When I'd seen a partial eclipse in Livermore in 2012, that had been a clear day, so even with only a partial eclipse it was very easy to see that the sky was unusually dim. There were no clouds to which one might attribute the change. With the rain clouds in Nebraska, it had to get very close to totality before it started to look very unusually dark.
Truth be told, it was rather maddening having to sit there, listening to the band play PBS songs while desperately hoping the clouds would kindly move aside. Someone even started up a "Go Away Clouds!" chant. There was a lovely historical irony to it: in ancient times people would bang pots and pans to chase away the dragon that was eating the sun, and here we were, making a lot of noise, hoping the clouds would go away so we could see it being eaten properly.
And thankfully, the metaphor held. Screaming at the dragon always works, eventually, if you keep at it, and the clouds did move aside, just for totality and the little bits of partiality on either side.
I'd told myself I wasn't going to waste time taking photos, but I'm glad I got a few. This is the best one.
The sky showed these colors all the way around, and the clouds made the 360-degree sunrise all the more dramatic. I loved all the colors in the sky; I hadn't expected there would still be so much light. Most eclipse photos are so closeup-focused on the sun that they leave out what the rest of the sky is doing, reducing it all to nearly white-on-black.
About a minute in, Bill Nye--who was leading us through the timing of when to take our glasses off and put them back on--called out that he could see Venus. (From the perspective of this photo, Venus was over to the right.) We were already cheering and screaming ever since the clouds moved aside for totality, but that started it all up again even louder.
I felt absolved, as though I'd finally lifted a family curse. Mom and Dad love eclipses. When Dad co-founded a technology startup in the late 90s, he called it Eclipse Technologies. Even the eye-color genes they gave me are eclipse-colored: mostly blue, but with a little hazel around the center, surrounding the black. When we tried to see the 1991 eclipse in Hawaii, the sky was clear until just before totality, at which point a cloud completely trolled us and kept us from seeing it. I was five at the time, and Mom and Dad have been seething about it ever since. Here in Nebraska, I had the exact opposite conditions.
After all my worrying about crowds preventing me from getting to the totality zone, it had proven to be a complete nonissue. Getting back out of the monument was the hard part, because everyone had arrived gradually all morning, but as soon as a massive cloud bank hid all but the first part of the second partial phase, everyone wanted to leave at once, and the monument was not really equipped to handle such logistics. They'd never had so many people there. Tour buses pulled in, one at a time, and maneuvered back out. School buses came through to gather the kids who'd come as a field trip. We heard that the traffic in Beatrice was totally gridlocked, and that was why our free shuttle buses took so long to come back and get us; after the first load, they couldn't come back out of town to retrieve us. I managed to slip onto a mostly-early one by virtue of being a single rider.
Sure enough, back in town, police officers were directing traffic. I had dinner at a local restaurant and drove back to Kansas afterwards, after the crowds had dissipated. I was still deprived of my data, but it was basically a straight shot south on Highway 77. Or at least it was supposed to be. The rain started up again, in much greater earnest this time, with a real thunderstorm. I saw multiple lightning strikes--straight-down smiting lightning strikes--and at times it was almost impossible to see ahead of me. The highway dog-legged a little bit and I missed a turn, but I think my detour took me out of the range of the rain, so that was okay. When sunset came, that whole side of the sky was swathed in bright red and orange, with brilliant gold at the edges of the clouds. So in the space of a day, the sky showed pretty much every spectacular thing there was to show.
I'd arrived in Kansas days early, but after one more sleep, it was time to leave early and drive back to Wichita to fly home.
Worth every moment.