We decided that the 83% totality we were were going to see here in Annapolis wouldn’t be impactful enough for our boys to make much of an impression. So we decided on a whim that we ought to make some effort, pull the boys out of school and head somewhere that we could actually see it. Kris found a COE campground up in NW Pennsylvania that was extremely reasonable so we made the trip up, even after watching the weather forecast diminish. There was a chance we weren’t going to see much of anything because of cloud cover but figured at this point we might as well give it a shot and that gamble paid off. It turned out to be a partly cloudy Monday and our campground had all the view of the horizon we needed to set up our chairs for a relaxing time watching one of our galaxies most interesting phenomenon.
The boys loved it (although EJ held some trepidation since he didn’t really know what was happening in the buildup and hype). We bought some special filters for the camera and captured the duration of the eclipse. All in all it turned out to be a pretty relaxed day once I returned from my morning errand.
Was the effort worth it? Well, its hard to measure an experience like that. The boys will be pushing 30 years old when the next one graces North America so its more important to us to share that with them than it was for them to witness it first hand I suppose. We did pay a hefty price, not only with the aforementioned errand, but also with getting caught in the return traffic and the famous Tolls of Pennsylvania (which have not yet rolled in).
