On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Elma
A couple of years ago someone in my extended family observed that the path of totality of the April 8, 2024 eclipse went right over our family farm in northwestern New York State. Initially there was a lot of interest, but life happens. Who would have thought that teenagers would object to missing school? So it was going to be a small group that gathered on the day.
I made my travel arrangements months ago. I am an experienced traveler. I have been on 6 continents. April 7, 2024 was THE WORST TRAVEL EXPERIENCE I HAVE EVER HAD!!! I wrote a long rant on the evils of Delta Airlines, but I decided that you did not need to be subjected to it. I spent a very long time at an airport that I had no intention of going anywhere near. It may be new and cleaner than it was the last time I passed through, but it is still a horrible place. We will now attempt to return to a Zen like state of calm to tell you about the rest of the experience.
My cousin gave us the use of his lake house on the farm. In that area, such houses are called camps.
He also left the services of beauteous Nala the Acrobat, beam walker and bed snuggler, to make us welcome.
The morning of April 8th was clear with the sun blazing in the sky. We could stand on the deck and have a perfect view. But then the clouds started to move in. And by the time it really started, we could see nothing with our official eclipse glasses. But almost miraculously, just at the moment of totality, the clouds thinned, AND WE COULD SEE IT!
You will have seen wonderful pictures of the event on the internet, so I will not subject you to mine, which I have saved only to remind myself that we did see it. But here are two images of the same view, first in the morning before anything started.
Then here is the same view at totality. At that moment, someone down the lake started shooting off firecrackers. I don’t know if it was in celebration or trying to drive off the demon. This is a sort of backwoods part of the Empire State.
We had decided that we would not go into Alexandria Bay on this trip. First because they were expecting mobs of people for the eclipse; and second because the real tourist season doesn’t start for a month or so and not much would be open. But the mobs did not appear and Tuesday was sunny and warm, so we went into the Bay for lunch.
After lunch we went over to the park on the St. Lawrence River to admire the follies that people with way too much money have built on the Thousand Islands, like Boldt Castle on Heart Island.
And this little camp upriver from the Castle, that someone built on a rock barely large enough to hold it. I imagine that it floods every spring.
Finally, just to reinforce the Zen, I noticed this patch of moss in bloom.
I should add that my return flights on April 10 went as scheduled. It was not particularly pleasant, but it wasn’t the horror of the trip out. Credit where due.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
I’ve never seen a total eclipse and probably never will(unless I win the lottery), but a fellow astrophotographer, “Cuiv the Lazy Geek”, that I follow on YouTube did. He is French and lives in Toyko and flew to DFW and observed the eclipse in Arkansas. He took a timelapse of the eclipse and filmed totality. This was not the first total eclipse that he’d seen but mentioned in his video of the 360 degree dusk that was quite remarkable.
eclare
The light in your photo of totality is so eerie.
Rusty
Part of my early childhood was growing up in Massena, NY, which somehow manages to be even farther north than Redwood. Decades later when we lived in western NY, we had many pleasant camping trips at the NY state campground in the thousand islands. We would get water front sites for our pop-up. The kids loved it, our little traveling home. For $25 a night NY will rent you a waterfront site that would cost you a million dollars to buy and build a house. (The same is true across the Adirondacks) We always loved the state for that.
Snarlymon
The totality pic looks like an impressionist painting. Erie and beautiful at the same time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Snarlymon: I was just thinking that!
Van Buren
It was a year ago today that American Airlines decided that I simply must spend an extra day in Key West, and that being flown to Newark the following day instead of LaGuardia was good enough. At least they didn’t lose our luggage on the way back, like they did on the way down.
Which is all to say it’s great to be able to travel around the world quickly, but it sure could be better.
oldster
At the moment of totality, I was perched on a bluff above Lake Ontario, looking north to Canada. Above us were dense clouds, all the way to the horizons in every direction. The sky was darker than your photo makes it — really nocturnal — but the horizons glowed all around.
It was not as sublime an experience as if we had been able to see the sun itself. But it was still distinctly surreal.
(I was going to say “eerie,” but I don’t want to provoke Great Lakes puns.)
Spanky
We drove to Cleveland because at 7 hours it’s more within our ever-expanding drivable zone. Gonna need a really distant place to get us on an aeroplane now. Like, off continent.
Anyway, we had clouds, too. High cirrus, and the unexpected result was that the shadow was rear projected onto them, letting us watch as they loomed over us just as the light shut off.
lowtechcyclist
My teenager had no problem whatsoever with missing two days of school to see the eclipse.
OzarkHillbilly
How many planets did others see during the eclipse? I was only able to see 2, Venus and Jupiter*, looked for the comet but realized real quick that w/o good binocs it was impossible.
* Saturn and Mars were supposed to be visible too tho more difficult to see. Not to be for me.
Barbara
@Van Buren: An extra day in Key West isn’t so bad, and the Newark Airport is close to the train station. But yeah, I do just about anything to avoid that airport otherwise.
We didn’t go anywhere, but were content to get a glimpse from our bedroom window of 93% of the full eclipse. My husband used glasses that he made using blank film (three layers is best, but two is supposed to be safe enough). It was very cool to see.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly:
I didn’t know to look for any planets, so I saw just one, to the right and down a little bit from the sun. I don’t know whether it was Venus or Jupiter.
waspuppet
@Spanky: It was completely clouded over in Waterloo, NY too, but that was cool in a different way.
And what really struck me was not the darkness itself—OK, so it looks like night; it looks like night every night—but the speed of the in and out. From cloudy afternoon to total night (and three minutes later the reverse) in about a minute.
Ol_Froth
We drove up to Westfield NY from Pittsburgh for the eclipse. The skies cleared just as totality was ending, and we got to see the diamond ring. I was surprised by how suddenly dark it got at the moment totality started. It wasn’t a gradual dimming, it was more like someone threw a switch and we were covered in a dome of darkness, with a narrow ring of breaking dawn visible on the Lake Erie horizon. Even though the normally 2 hour trip home took seven hours to to the very heavy traffic, it was still an amazing experience, and totally worth it!
OzarkHillbilly
@lowtechcyclist: That one was Venus. Jupiter was to the left.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: I only saw Venus, but the high cirrus clouds I was looking through probably made stars or planets harder to pick out.
OzarkHillbilly
@Matt McIrvin: We had high cirrus clouds too. I blame them for my inability to spot Saturn and Mars. :-(
New Deal democrat
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep.
One of the hardest things to convey about totality is the color palette, because the video you see on tv has to be heavily filtered down to black and white.
In totality, the sky is the color of twilight, planets but not stars are visible, and at least for some of it, a ghostly grey “full moon” illuminated by earthshine surrounded by the sun’s corona.
Eric NNY
I live in Oxbow, just south of Alexandria Bay. The neighbors and I were all set up on the river and had an amazing view of the eclipse until about totality when the clouds came flying in to obscure it. They cleared out right after totality so I’m pretty sure we’re cursed…..
New Deal democrat
I did not know that you had ties to WNY. Hope you got to enjoy beef on weck and/or Ted’s hot dogs while you were there.
Also (a great way to initiate a debate) Buffalo recently got named one of the 10 cities where pizza is most popular, with a claim to its own style of pizza: slightly doughy crust, sweeter sauce, more cheese (and grease) and “cupped and charred” pepperoni.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: And there’s a strange golden band that looks kind of like sunset encircling the entire horizon, even though the Sun is not there at all. That’s light being scattered toward you from the atmosphere over the places outside the umbra that are still in sunlight.
And while the solar corona is many times dimmer than the solar photosphere (so it won’t burn your eyes out), it’s still bright enough that photographs don’t really convey the dynamic range of the whole scene. It looks like a ring of burning silver.
OzarkHillbilly
@New Deal democrat: Our horizons were beautifully streaked with pink, violet, a light orange, etc.
OldDave
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: SWMBO and I returned to our home town in Arkansas to visit family and see the eclipse (our second – we experienced the 2017 event while visiting family in Missouri). None of my cell phone snaps are worth sharing, but a professional photographer was also visiting family in NE Arkansas and captured this image. The next eclipse to pass over the US is twenty-one years from now, in 2045 (and it even passes over Florida!). Don’t think I’ll be seeing that one.
New Deal democrat
@OzarkHillbilly: The darkness in the sky approaching from the West was also something out of a Stephen King novel.
3Sice
Is that LGA glossy AI generated? Lulz at the GenZ cosplay fantasy.
OzarkHillbilly
@New Deal democrat: I have to admit I did not notice that and unlike in 2017, this time we had 360 clear unobstructed views of distant horizons.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
Funny, we’ve gone completely the other way since the pandemic. We used to drive into Suitland (Census Bureau) every day, and after work we’d sometimes see family or friends in DC, Alexandria, or Rockville. So when your local driving is like that, driving a few hours to another city isn’t that big a deal.
But the pandemic (and the subsequent ‘reimagining’ of the Census HQ building) ended our commuting four years ago, and now it’s a big deal just to drive up to Annapolis.
But with my wife’s family in central Florida, we resumed flying pretty quickly, the choice being between a two-day drive each way versus leaving the house at 7am and being in Ybor City for a late lunch. So for the eclipse, we flew from BWI to Detroit, then drove down to where our friends live in NW Ohio. There’s nontrivial driving there too, but somehow it’s different when it’s at either end of a plane flight.
Elma
@3Sice: No. Snapped a pic of the wall mural while I was sitting for 8 hours, hoping they were not going to move my departure gate from 83 to the far end of the 70s with only 10 minutes to get there. Not ranting.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks!
Xavier
Parked the RV in my son’s driveway in Austin for the eclipse, got to see my new granddaughter (born Valentine’s Day). It was overcast but we could get glimpses through the clouds, very cool.
Matt McIrvin
@OzarkHillbilly: As totality approached I was looking at the last slivers of the Sun through my eclipse glasses, so I missed some of what was going on around me. If I had it to do again I might *not* look at the Sun for that bit (everything requires good timing of course; you don’t even want to see a little of the photosphere with your naked eye).
frosty
@Rusty: This is one of the reasons I love traveling with our camper. We have friends with second houses, some with water views. I call our trailer our second house, but with wheels. We change the view to any place we feel like it.
frosty
I’ve been to the Thousand Islands many times. It’s a magical place.
ETA: Eclipse. We saw it from a state park (with our trailer) SW of Cleveland. Someone outside the park lit off some fireworks at totality. Really? All this is going on and you think you need fireworks?
3Sice
@Elma:
I LULZed because that conceptual image has all the women sleeveless and in short skirts, and all the men in ties and jackets.
Elma
@3Sice: Rampant sexism in advertising. Who would have thought of it? S/
Brachiator
Friends and family in Texas got to see the totality of the solar eclipse. They had a blast and now would not mind going to Spain in 2026 to see the next solar eclipse.
People who saw this one were very lucky. Totality was around 4 minutes.
Totality in 2026 will typically be around 1 minute and 40 seconds.
Uncle Cholmondeley
I would totally read a long rant on the evils of Delta Airlines.
chrisanthemama
Hubby and I took our 98-year-old dad from Livingston to Corsicana, TX to see his first (and probably only) total eclipse, about a 3-hour drive each way. Cloudy all the way there, with occasional peeks of blue sky, and us all saying “keep hope alive!”. From first contact through the moment of totality, clouds (large and small) drifted across the sun, until at the last moment the clouds parted. It was magnificent. So blessed to have seen our second eclipse (the first was 2017 in Corvallis, OR), and even better, to have helped our dad fulfill a bucket-list item he didn’t even know he had.
Gloria DryGarden
@OzarkHillbilly: I saw Venus, and Jupiter, farther off to the left than I expected. I too hoped to see the comet. I don’t think anyone in our group had the right binoculars, darn it.
we all cried. I can’t say why it was so deeply moving, but we sure cried. It was a beautiful day near mt ida, on lake oachita.
WaterGirl
@Gloria DryGarden: Your first comment has to be manually approved before everyone can see it.
I just found your two comments, and I approved both of them. The next comment you write will show up right away for everyone.
Welcome!