A view of our campsite. As you can see, the campground had lots of mature trees, so plenty of shade. Good thing too, because summers in Missouri are hot and muggy, and while the T@b's air conditioning did great at night, we like to spend our days outside!
A couple more views of our set up:
Lots of privacy, and a fairly big campsite. Fred and Lucy take their posts by the road to greet visitors. Next door, Jeff and Kathy set up the Scamp.
We used this huge area between the two sites to set up their canopy where we spent lots of time, sitting and watching the world go by. This is something we've become very good at doing.
This trip was about the solar eclipse, but we were excited for a whole different reason!
Time for a new state sticker on the map! Andy did the honors.
We can't believe it took us a year to get to Missouri to camp, but here we are, filling in that hole in the Midwest states.
Missouri became our 12th state! Yay, us!
Now, about this eclipse thing. We may have gone a little overboard. I named it "eclipsalypse" since it was such a big deal nationwide. We even had a news crew come interview us, we bought lots of eclipse type things, and made eclipse jokes. Let's see what we've got.
First of all, we have our super awesome eclipse glasses, made from a PopTart wrapper and Jeff's regular glasses.
Nah, just teasing. Was funny though...
Jeff had purchased us legitimate solar eclipse watching glasses so we wouldn't go blind. That was nice of him.
We made sure to have the proper gum to chew while watching the eclipse. Jeff even tried to do tricks with it!
Also didn't go well, but at least his breath was minty fresh!
So, seriously, local news stopped by reaaaaallly early in the morning, and Andy was the only one up when they came through, so they asked if they could interview him. He had bed head and was still in the process of making coffee, so he said if they'd come back later, one of our group, at least, would be up for an interview.
We chose Jeff. Jeff was really into the eclipsalypse, so we decided he should be group spokesperson. I took a screenshot of the video I took of him being interviewed. I couldn't show you the video because Jeff was fine with the TV interview, but didn't much care for me documenting it, and there may have been an off-camera gesture to let me know. 😀
We had one more goofy idea that actually turned out really cool. Watch the video below to see how we taught people all over the world about what happens during a solar eclipse:
Hahahahahaaaa! Don't worry. All beer was consumed by the end of our trip.
One of our biggest concerns about Eclipse Day was cloud cover. We couldn't control the weather, we had planned to be in this spot for at least six months, so it's not like we were going anywhere, we just had to hope for the best.
The day was cloudy, but several campers gathered in a grassy spot at the center of the campground to try to see as much of the eclipse as we could. News sites around the globe predicted tons and tons of people and traffic jams and crowds and other eclipsalypse type problems, but here's what we experienced.
Not too scary, was it? Ha! We socialized with our camping neighbors and enjoyed our setup as we waiting for the event. The excitement building up to it was all part of the fun!
I'm testing my eclipse glasses here, and couldn't see a darn thing! Guess they work!
Some of the kids from the campground lit up these cool neon spheres. As the day got darker, (it was like the sun was setting) these would glow brightly, and they even spun in the breeze. I took video:
We were getting close to the main event, and the crowd gathered voiced their concerns that the cloud cover had thickened, and we wouldn't be able to see the corona. The moment we had been waiting for suddenly looked anticlimactic. Bummer!
But wait! Remember, since we were in the path of totality, there was over two minutes where we would be able to see the total eclipse. At the last thirty seconds or so, the clouds moved and WE SAW THE CORONA!!
It's not the best picture, certainly, but it was taken with my phone as I stared up at this cool moment of science! The crowd cheered! It was like we all were connected by something, if just for one brief moment. The whole experience was wonderful, and I would absolutely do it again!
When the main event was over, most campers hopped in their rigs and joined the eclipsalypse traffic to go home. Not us! We planned ahead and had the whole day to ourselves at the campground. Unfortunately, it rained on and off that night, so we spent a lot of time in our separate campers, but we enjoyed wrapping up the trip with Jeff and Kathy.
Happy camping!
Peggy
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