My Brilliant Idea for Eclipse Chasing in 2024
August 28, 2017 – The buzz is slightly wearing off now that a week has gone by since our excellent eclipse adventure. What would I do differently? Ah, that’s what has led to the brilliant idea for maximizing your chances at clear skies. Going to our chosen viewing spot a couple of days early was fine this time. We got to try out several restaurants, do a little practice run to the (not used) potential viewing location, and see the sights in a city we’d never visited as tourists. Remember, we chose a pretty-good-sized city within about an hour of the line of totality, with the chance to drive up or down the line, if we had to. A medium-sized city gave us good flight options, good rental car options, good hotel options and last-minute shopping opportunities, too.
All that logic was successful last week, for sure.
Where we ran into problems was with the “average” weather forecast for this time of year. Sad to say, we did not receive the average good weather in our chosen location. But our chosen hotel spot near shopping and with the opportunity to drive up and down the path, worked in our favor and let us adapt to our weather situation in the final hours. We bought food, drinks, air mattresses, paper towels, and toilet paper to take on our improvised, last-minute 500-mile drive to good weather. And we did – we headed southeast at high speed along the line of totality. High speed.
If you read the post before last, you know we headed out late the evening before the eclipse and spent a few hours that night in a Walmart parking lot 350 miles from our hotel base of operations, just trying to avoid an all-nighter. Staying in the Walmart parking lot, while free of financial cost and in an area where hotels may have been full of eclipse travelers, turned out to be miserable. Hot, cramped, and in a too-well-lit parking lot, so no real sleeping transpired. How to avoid that for the next eclipse?
The brilliant new plan: choose that medium-sized city within an hour’s drive of the path again for homebase. Decide how many days in advance you wish to spend there. Find out the eclipse-related activities that might be scheduled for that area. Find out about touristy activities to do while you’re waiting for Eclipse Day. Ensure there are hotels available near restaurants and shopping, about a month out buy plane tickets, reserve hotel room for entire stay, reserve rental car. Then along the line of totality – about 6 hours in each direction – reserve two more hotel rooms, one in each of those places for one night, the night before the Eclipse – especially if they have 24-hour-before-visit cancellations. That way you won’t be trying to sleep in your vehicle overnight and you won’t have to worry that all the hotels are full if you have to move out from under clouds at the last minute.
In 2017, the Eclipse was in the afternoon on a Monday. April 8, 2024, is a Monday, eclipse again in the early afternoon. Another minor adjustment I’d make would be to schedule the flight home for later in the day on the day after the eclipse. Having to leave our hotel at 6 a.m. after two very short sleeping nights was a chore. If we could have checked out a few hours later, we could have caught up on some sleep. I’m sure we chose that flight because it was cheaper than the others.
But if you’re made of money, as the amateur astronomer accused me of acting when he heard my brilliant idea, and you’re going to reserve hotels in three different locations on the night before the eclipse, you might as well pay a few more bucks and fly home at a reasonable time of day on the day after the eclipse!
There you have it, the brilliant idea for eclipse chasing – for next time.
