The eclipse is an afternoon event. You don’t need a hotel under totality & you don’t need to drive the entirety of both directions on Mon. Drive partway on Sun; I’m sure there are hotels rooms 2-3 hrs away & then a leisurely breakfast & finish the drive Mon morn, &/or drive partway home & then get a hotel Mon night.
Do you want to be in the will?
It was a running joke with my great aunt that anytime anyone did anything to piss off her off, she said she was taking you out of the will, this included things like not passing the salt & pepper fast enough
I’ve been planning this trip since the last USA TSE in 2017. I had plans and backup plans for getting to Texas and being able to drive hundreds of miles if necessary. I booked plane tickets to Texas last August on Southwest Airlines, and when I heard that their pilots were threatening a pilot strike, I booked a fully refundable backup flight on another airline.
But I never imagined that all of Texas would be cloudier than the northeast. I used to live in San Antonio when I was a kid and I visited Waco a few times. All I remember is day after day of unending sunny weather and the climate being as dry as dust.
For what it’s worth, I can get a flight credit on Southwest and my hotel in San Antonio is refundable until Saturday. I need to see how my mom feels about all of this though.
I’ve been looking at the local forecast. Here’s some experience I have with spring storms in North Texas. Right now they are preding PM thunderstorms and only a 24ish% chance of rain at about the time of the eclipse.
Thunderstorms in the spring rarely last very long, and often there are clear skies before and/or after the rain. We do sometimes get rain the whole day, but for this time of year, I will say it’s the exception rather than the rule.
The region of Niagara Falls, Ontario, has preemptively declared a state of emergency for April 8 because of the expected influx of crowds.
I have no intention of going anywhere near Niagara Falls on that day but some of the highways I’ll need to be on head in that general direction.
ETA: The local extended forecast still only goes to April 7, but it’s changed (of course, as extended forecasts always will). It’s now expected to clear the night of April 6, and “mixed sun and cloud” has become sunny cloudless skies April 7 following a week of mostly bad weather. Looking good!! It’ll probably be different again tomorrow when April 8 finally appears on the radar.
Exactly! Depending on the type of cloud cover, it may work to your advantage.
Very thin cloud cover will enable you to see the eclipse with a milky sun, the big fluffy pretty clouds will clear away.
During an eclipse, shallow cumulus clouds start dissipating in large proportions when only a fraction of the sun is covered , and they don’t reform until the end of the event, according to a study published February 12 in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment
The eclipse busting clouds are heavy rain clouds or thunderheads.
As noted, in 2017 it was “dammit, it’s cloudy!!”… until about 5 minutes before totality.
It can also help if there are other things to do nearby (if you’re travelling some distance and need an overnight stay) - so you can enjoy other aspects of the trip. Where we’re going is sort of on the outskirts of nowhere… NOTHING to do without driving at least an hour… but we’ll have most of a week to just unplug and relax.
My plan du jour is to go to Mt Magazine State Park – if it is cloudy, at least I will visit the highest point in Arkansas. Plus a bunch of hiking trails and such.
Quoting myself to say it’s worse than that. Some of the wine country I had planned to spend time in is perilously close to Niagara Falls, and is indeed within the Niagara Region of Ontario that’s declared a public emergency for that day. So now not only is weather a potential problem, but so is traffic. I still hope to reserve lunch at a nice winery restaurant and watch the eclipse from the vineyards. My favourite winery restaurant actually has a huge deck overlooking the vineyards that would be too cold for having lunch at this time of year but ideal for the viewing.
For last minute planning, they recommend this spot weather site that uses a variety of models:
All of the models seem to agree right now that Texas looks cloudy on eclipse day, and northern New England does not. I’ve decided I need to start considering backup plans. There is no point in spending time and money flying to Texas if I can drive to a better viewing location in my backyard.
So I just spent the evening looking for a hotel here in New England that is as close as possible to the eclipse path the night prior to the eclipse so we don’t have to drive the whole way up on the day of. There is absolutely nothing available that is actually in the eclipse path that I could find, of course. This took a while, but I finally found a decent hotel in Vermont within two hours of the eclipse path. It is fully refundable until Saturday and the rate was fairly reasonable.
I’ll make a final decision on Friday as to whether I’m headed to Texas or Vermont.
If you go to Texas, @robby , we have a Dope Fest in a good spot for lunch on Saturday in New Braunfels. Join us! I’ll get the info and come back and paste the link here.
That was shortly after the TSE in August 2017. I guess I’ve been planning for this eclipse for years.
But after this one, I’m pretty much done. I’m not going to chase eclipses globally, and the next good one to hit CONUS is in August 2045. I’ll be 83 then, if I’m still kicking.
Thank you for the invite, @Bullitt! Unfortunately our flight to Texas arrives on Saturday evening. We were planning to drive from my mom’s house in Houston to San Antonio on Sunday.
I hope y’all have a good time, though! I love New Braunfels. My grandparents took me to the Schlitterbahn soon after it first opened, and I took my son there 30 years later. We also went to nearby Natural Bridge Caverns. And of course Texas Hill Country is beautiful.
Ooooh, I don’t like that, not one little bit. Our base is about 1½ hrs away from there but we were thinking about a Canadian lunch on Sunday; methinks the border crossings & restaurant might not be worth it with those kind of crowds. We’ll be far enough away & in rural enough NY state that I don’t anticipate it’ll cause any issues on Mon. I’ve heard from a local friend that the estimate was for the county to triple their population; of course their population is on 40,000. I did 78,000 at a sporting event last month, where everyone left from one place at one time w/o issue; therefore, I don’t expect 50% more over an entire county to be too much of an issue; especially with our planned departure route.
Cleveland next Monday on Weather Underground went from “Partly” Cloudy to “Mostly” Cloudy. Accuweather says “Partly Sunny”, but The National Weather Service says there is a 30% chance of rain. I can literally see the thing from the nearby park, REALLY don’t want to have to drive anywhere.
Left home stupid early, my first flight was nominal and I’m now passing through DFW on the way to Mazatlán. The weather folks are now forecasting 3 days of cirrostratus ending on 4/8 then clouding up on the 9th.
Which suggests cirrostratus at best if the forecast slows down more, and thicker clouds if it accelerates.
The good news is I picked a place that will be a party even if the eclipse is a 100% bust in heavy rain and dawn-to-sunset thick clouds. And not by accident I assure you.
Well, April 8 is now officially on the local weather board. The details keep changing, of course, but the big picture remains stable: overcast and rainy for the next four days, then clearing by April 6 with a mix of sun and cloud thereafter. So unless things change drastically, the only remaining question seems to be what sort of sun/cloud mix there will be on April 8. It will also be relatively warm that day, too.
