I, on the other hand, don’t like that map.
The place I’m going, Syracuse, NY, is listed at a 32% chance of clear skies.
The place I live, three plus hours away, is just 93% of totality but has just about 60% chance of clear skies. (I find this figure surprisingly high, but who am I to argue with Science?)
Maybe I should just stay home.*
*I don’t think I will. But I don’t have to like the odds!
Please, please, please make every effort to get to totality. You will be glad you did, there is no comparison at all between totality and even a 90% partial. A completely different experience.
This man knows what he’s talking about!
The general area I’m intending to land up in runs around 34%.
There’s a brief blip in it of 50% – but that’s barely over the line of totality, and further east than I had been intending to go.
I’ll have to see what the weather’s actually doing on the day. Will probably drive into totality even if it’s cloudy all over, and hope. Somebody way earlier in the thread said that some of the effects are impressive even in the clouds; and I’ve known weather to clear when the forecast said it wouldn’t.
Oh, I’m not really serious. I definitely plan on going. It’s just that the mathematician in me says, well, 0.32 x 1.00 < 0.59 x 0.93, so I should go with the bird in the hand. I have to tell my inner mathematician that while his arithmetic is accurate, his assumptions are not!
But thanks for the encouragement; I do appreciate it!
They’re saying 54.2% chance of clear skies in Defiance, OH and environs, which is where we’ll be.
Hopefully we’ll be a bit south of there to get further into the zone of totality so we can experience it for longer (doesn’t seem to change the cloud cover forecast), but that depends on what the traffic is like out there.
It’s hard for me to believe that everywhere in the zone of totality will be packed with people and (more importantly) cars, including ‘can’t get there from here’ places like NW Ohio, but I guess we’ll find out.
Here’s a beautiful visual from the Washington Post (gift link) showing the path of darkness across the USA:
Interesting note on Texas: “A 195-mile stretch of Interstate 35 between Austin and Dallas is in the path. Texas officials are already warning drivers not to stop on roadways during the eclipse. You’d have to drive 1,950 miles an hour to keep up with the moon’s shadow.”
Anyone know where I can rent a SR-71? Avis is sold out of 'em & Enterprise doesn’t rent those anymore
Sorry, I got the last one.
I call shotgun!
I expect anywhere within an hour’s drive of anything REMOTELY major will be crowded.
We’re staying about 20 miles outside of the borders of nowhere, so I’m not too worried - plus, the house we’re renting has a pier into a lake, so if the weather is at all clear we should be in great shape.
Though I’m tempted to find out if any of the nearby towns has any kind of gathering planned, as it’s fun to be around other people. When we went to SC in 2017, we were on the beach with a surprisingly small number of people (July, i.e. top beach weather), but it was fun to have a few other groups nearby.
As with any vehicle rental, the key is booking it many months in advance. You snooze, you lose 
.
Is anyone trying yet to produce actual forecast maps based on actual current weather data? Or are all the [likelihood of clear skies] sites/cites just based on long term historical averages for that date? Frankly I’d put near zero faith in any prediction based on current data more than about 6 days out. Weather science just ain’t there yet. And may never be; chaos is a thing.
Unrelated to the above …
As has been discussed upthread a LOT, the problem it that ruralia has both few people and few roads. It only takes a few 10s of thousands of city dwellers all trying to “drive out into the country” to overwhelm every minor road for 3 counties away from the metro area.
In places where the terrain is hilly, forested, and roads are curvy there may only be stopping places for 1 car per mile of road. And most of those will have a very obstructed view of the sky due to the trees. So now 10,000 cars will need 10,000 miles of nearby rural roads just to find a place to pull off safely. And maybe double that to have a nice view of the sky. Gonna be a clusterf***.
Obviously hills, curves, and trees are simply absent in most of e.g. Texas. But roads are also absent. Meanwhile Greater Dallas / Fort Worth has ~8 million people, Greater San Antonio ~2.5 mil, and Greater Austin has a further ~2.5m. If those 13m people get 2x2 in their pick-em-up trucks and head out, that’s 7+ million pickup trucks.
I’ll be on the beach at Mazatlán. I hope like heck there’s an amazing umpteen thousand person fiesta going on. I’ll be disappointed otherwise.
As far as I know they’re all based on long term historical averages. And I agree that I’d put zero faith on any prediction more than about 6 days out – and, in this area, not a hell of a lot on the 6 day prediction, either. I might adjust depending on the weather report the morning of the 8th.
No reason to drive out into rural areas, we’ve got plenty of places for viewing. The problem is going to be people coming into the cities. All of the FW hotels are booked solid, and I’ve heard similar about the rest of the 35 corridor. Said corridor, though, is likely to look like the day before all the universities start classes
Yeah. I35 in/around D/FW is not gonna need people to drive into the countryside. The event will happen in / throughout the metroblob.
It’s the other places, where the cities are partial & the rural areas are where totality is that’re gonna be a mess that surprises lots of folks expecting ruralia to be empty like every other day. Oops on them.
@Ulf_the_Unwashed we’re thinking about the Syracuse Mets game, but discouraged by the 32% chance of clear skies. Maybe if we wait until the week before and the forecast looks more positive, we’ll see if there are tickets left? Right now, it looks like not that many tickets have been sold yet.
Another possibility that I considered was Schroon Lake on the fringes of the Adirondacks, where chances of clear skies are 47%, but that’s going to be the easiest destination for people coming from NYC and Albany since it’s right off I-95, and at 3 hours from NYC, doable for a day trip. All of the AirBnbs in the area are booked for that night, too. So maybe I should look for something a bit more remote like Indian Lake or Minerva Lake.
(We’ll be in our cabin in the Catskills on Sunday night and need to be home on Long Island (mid-Nassau) on Monday night)
So apparently there are at least a couple of baseball teams making the eclipse part of their opening day, but frankly I can’t think of many worse places (except indoors, of course) to observe an eclipse than a baseball stadium full of fans.
Apart from looking straight at the sun/moon, there are many effects of the eclipse that require observing nature: the changes in the sounds and activities of birds, insects, and other animals; the stilling of the wind; the sight of sunrise/sunset all around the horizon in every direction, eclipse shadow bands, etc.
You’d miss all of that in a stadium, and instead be surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people yelling and screaming, and waiting for the game to start. ETA: and you’re practically guaranteed traffic problems.
If any thoughtful Dopers are considering being in a ball park for the eclipse, I strongly recommend they reconsider.
Defiance is about an hour WSW of Toledo, but people in Toledo would be heading due south, or close to it, to get into the path of the eclipse. Driving towards Defiance would be driving parallel to the path of the eclipse, which wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
Toledo’s about as close to a major city as there is nearby.
But as has also been discussed much upthread, the problem isn’t so much getting there in the first place, it’s the traffic jam afterwards. One car per mile of rural road isn’t going to be a problem. The problem would be the opposite: if people were parked practically bumper to bumper for miles along that rural road.
The roads in question for us would be those heading south and SSE from Defiance. (Defiance is just inside the zone of totality, so we might want to drive maybe 10-20 miles further S/SSE to experience more time of totality.) Who’s going to be on them? We’ve discussed Toledo. The people from Columbus would have to go through the zone of totality and most of the way out the other side to be on those roads.
People from Fort Wayne, if they head into Ohio, would be taking U.S. 30 or 33, which are both south of where we’d be driving, and by the time they’re in Ohio, they’re already closer to the center line of the path of totality than we hope to be. They’d have to then head away from the center line on local roads to get to the roads we’d be on.
Detroit, maybe? Lake Erie blocks their shortest theoretical path to the eclipse path; they’d be going through Toledo and then S/SSE.
Maybe there’ll be a lot of people on the roads immediately south of Defiance, but it’s sure hard to see who they’d be.