Anyway, my wife had extra vacation she needed to take off, so we decided to make a trip out of it. Got a cabin owned by her aunt and uncle in the north GA mountains which is just inside the path, for Sunday night. Then yesterday morning we drove another 45 minutes to Andrews, NC which was dead on the centerline. Tiny little town that's probably never seen anything like it, so tons of people swarmed there. It was pretty cool, they had the downtown streets (all 4 of em
) closed down for vendor tents and junk, some live music and food and beer in a park area, and people were just camped out wherever. After scouting it all out, we posted up on some chairs in the shade where we could just step out and look up every so often as the partial eclipse was happening.
As it got really close, it started getting real dim, which was so surreal. It wasn't like your usual 7-9pm kinda light. I read an article today that described it best; like a low-light instagram filter got put over the earth. We would look up at the sun through the glasses, then take them off and look around only a few seconds later and it would be noticeably dimmer each time. It started getting cooler, and a lot quieter as vehicles were no longer driving through, and everyone was just kinda paying attention. As it came down to the last sliver of light, you could hear the whole town sort of cheering as it was nearing totality. Then I feel like it just "clicked" into place -- the moon completely covered the sun and there was an amazing halo of light. It was way cooler than we had even anticipated. Everybody was losing their shit. No photo could do it justice, and I just wanted to get a photo of the whole scene, the evening looking sky with sunset-like light all around. But I wish I hadn't even bothered. It felt like it was over in 30 seconds, even though where we were it was supposedly over 2 and a half minutes. Pretty much as soon as totality was over, we packed it up; after that it was just the same thing as before in reverse. And traffic out of there got bad quick.
We thought it would be cool, and just an excuse to take a trip and a day off work, and not really sure if it would all be worth it for that 2 minutes, but in the end it was so worth it and way better than expected. I may consider making a trip for the next one in 2024. Sounded like friends who stayed down around Atlanta didn't get the full effect, so the eclipse was neat but nothing too exciting. I haven't heard anyone who was actually in the path say that it was just okay.