Wednesday, August 23, 2017

The Solar Eclipse. August 21, 2017

We drove Sunday from Grosse Ile, MI to Madisonville, KY. The mapping sites said it would be about an 8 hour drive... First we met Alison outside Toledo, Ohio, because she had just spent a "girls' weekend" at Put-In-Bay, an island in Lake Erie. We stopped at a rest area where we saw some cool old cars that the kids wanted to photograph.



We stopped for dinner near the end of our trip; by the time we arrived at our hotel it was almost time for bed! We went for a swim anyway because it was such a great pool. Unfortunately there was no rollaway bed reserved for Toby--the booking site I used did not request one. However, when the clerk saw what I had paid for the rooms she said "Wow, you must have booked these rooms really early, before they blocked out the rooms and raised the prices". I think she probably was not supposed to say that...

In the morning we went down to breakfast among hundreds of other guests. We could see a picnic table and patio outside in a courtyard and decided that would be a good viewing spot. Strangely enough no one else was out there!  We went out a little bit early to stake out our spot. We played a game I invented to illustrate the eclipse: Adam was the sun, and the other small kids rotated around him (Zane was Mercury, Sydney Venus, and Delia Earth). I placed the moon (white hat) over Delia's face as she rotated around the sun. They got the idea.



Toby found some cicada shells and the kids had fun with them.


We were still pretty early for the eclipse so Alison and I took the kids to the pool. It is truly an amazing pool for a hotel--Olympic size!



When it was almost time for the eclipse we all went back over to the picnic table where Bill and Toby had set up the cooler for our lunch. I instructed the kids on using their glasses and all did well. A man came by and offered to take our photo all together. Here are the kids: Sydney, Zane, Adam, Delia and Toby, and below where Alison, Bill and I joined them.



I did not take photos of the eclipse but Toby did! The ones with the reddish cast were taken with his smart phone while wearing the blackout glasses. He went out to the parking lot where a man had a telescope set up with filters and was able to take photos from there too.






After the eclipse was done we went to the pool and swam until dinnertime. We drove half a mile to Appleby's for dinner--all the traffic was gone by then. What a perfect day!

1 comment:

pedalpower said...

Nice eclipse photos Linda. We had the glasses but it wasn't total here and was cloudy off and on.