My wife and I got in the car at 11:00 today and drove north. As we went from New Hampshire into Vermont, the traffic slowed down and the cell service deteriorated. When Interstate 91 came to a halt, we got off the highway and headed northwest. At 3:23 we found a turnout somewhere along the side of the road through Groton State Forest. We joined a few other souls standing around and got to witness one of the most spectacular events I’ve ever seen. I thought I had seen a solar eclipse in the backyard of my childhood home in 1970 in Holden, Massachusetts. Not so. That was a partial solar eclipse. Not the same thing. This one was total. And it differed from the other one I saw just by the slightly more than two minutes that it went total. The forest quieted down. It got darker and darker. The stars came out. And then, the eclipsing sun, that you could only look at through those ridiculous cardboard glasses that everyone had, went behind the moon. Total darkness. The glasses came off. And then this bright sparkly ring of light appeared in the sky. It looked exactly like all those pictures you see of a total solar eclipse. Right in front of us. It was incredible.
We celebrated for about three minutes, got back into the car, and beat the traffic back to Massachusetts.
The glasses have made it into my Real World Stuff™ collection.
Ben