There was such a stir surrounding the eclipse. We live only about 60 miles from where totality was expected. Several days prior to the event we were in McCall, ID which was also very close to 100% totality. We were seeing news coverage of 30 mile backups on Hwy 26 of people trying to get to Prineville for the Eclipse Festival they were having there on Thursday-5 days before the eclipse. Unbelievable! We saw aerial views of Madras that took your breathe away for how many people were in that little town. Sadly--a plane crashed outside of Madras on Saturday. There were reports from all the Eastern Oregon airports that you had to make an appointment to land. That is almost unheard of.
I thought I was getting prepared. I got online three weeks before the eclipse to order glasses for us, Chris and Tom and Maddy. Little did I know at the time that there were a lot of glasses out there that weren't certified as being safe to use. The stories were coming out that Amazon was recalling lots of glasses. I had tried ordering on Amazon but wasn't guaranteed delivery on time so I tried Wal-Mart instead. I found some that they claimed would arrive on time. They cost $50 but I thought I was getting something that was acceptable. Christopher's and Tom's arrived in time. Mine were predicted to arrive on the day of the eclipse according to the estimate after they were shipped (several days later than promised when ordering) so I knew they wouldn't arrive in time. Turned out that they didn't arrive until 4 days after the eclipse.
Chris decided to come down to Vancouver to experience the eclipse. Bellingham was only going to have 88% totality and he wanted to experience closer to 100%. Vancouver experienced a 99% total eclipse. So we asked him to bring all his glasses down so that we could use them since we knew that ours wouldn't arrive in time. Bill looked at them and thought that they didn't look right so he looked up online and sure enough, Wal-Mart had pulled them for not being safe. I was so mad. I got no e-mail to warn us that they weren't safe and that we shouldn't use them. I called to try to get a refund several times but because it was a third party, they wouldn't honor it. Just gave me a sketchy cell phone number to call that no one answered. So mad that I got caught up in the scam that so many others had and no more glasses to purchase anywhere. Chris was so disappointed. Chris and Bill did figure out how to make a cereal box pinhole camera though so that is what we ended up using.
In the meantime, Tom was somewhere between Cheyenne and Jackson Hole. His plan was to watch the eclipse from Grand Teton National Park which was in the line of totality. We finally got a hold of him while he was driving but he was insisting he was going hiking during the eclipse no matter what. He had no reservations but managed to get a hotel room for the exorbitant price of almost $1000 for the night. I about choked when I heard that is how much he had to pay. It was one of the few rooms left in town though and all the camping spots were taken too so he didn't have anywhere to put of his tent. I had this total fear of the eclipse and was scared for Tom. When he let me know that the hotel gave him a pair of glasses that were certified as safe, I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Since Chris was here and there had been such a big deal made of how bad traffic would be, I decided to work from home and watched the coverage on TV. Here on the home front, Chris and Bill went out every so often to try to get a look through the cereal box. I tried a couple of times but couldn't get the hang of it. Man I would have loved to have glasses that actually were safe! So afraid of being outside at all, I avoided the front yard as much of possible but went out on the back deck every so often. It did get darker but being that we were in the 99% range, I thought it would get darker than it actually did. So partly because of my fear and partly because we didn't have eclipse glasses, it was kind of a non-event for me. As soon as the eclipse was mostly over, Bill and Chris picked up some lunch for us and then we urged Chris to get moving to head back to Bellingham. Knowing that there would be lots of people from Seattle area that traveled to areas of totality, he didn't have much of a window before they would all be arriving in Vancouver and tying up our traffic.
Tom managed to snag a parking spot at Grand Teton National Park. They were expecting to be very crowded and needing to close one side of the highway and have one-way traffic only so that they could parallel park cars on the highway. Tom was about two hours into his hike when the eclipse hit there. He laid down on the asphalt trail and enjoyed it. He called me during totality. He was so excited. He took pictures but he also met a lot of people from all over the world on the trail and met a photographer who offered to send him photos.
After the eclipse, Tom continued hiking up to see four of the lakes there. He thought he was hiking back to the parking lot where his car was but as it turned out, his car was 10 miles away. Luckily some park rangers picked him up and gave him a ride part of the way. By this time he had already hiked 20 miles and his feet were not doing very well and it was pretty late at night already. His original plan was to drive up to Yellowstone the next day and hike some more there but he knew that he wasn't going to be in any shape to enjoy his trip to Yellowstone and got as far as Idaho Falls that night and continued to drive home and arrive here in Vancouver on Tuesday night. So happy to see my guy. It had been two years since he had been home and except for one day last June, that was also the last time we had seen him.
Verdict. So for Bill and me--kind of a non-event. Chris--not sure if he was glad he came down to see it or not. Tom-totally thought it was the coolest thing ever.
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