I made the decision to drive up to Upstate New York for the complete eclipse before a few days before the event. My plan was to drive to Ithaca, stay there overnight, get on a conference call at 7 am in the morning, and then drive to a city within the total path of eclipse - while Rochester would have an eclipse lasting close to 4 minutes, the Geneva area, an hour north, would have a respectable 2:30 minutes.
Initially Anne wasn't planning to come along. She decided to. Ellie at first asked if we could take Reid and Maisie along (of course we would love to), and then she decided to come herself.
Sunday April 7. With Anne's church commitments, we didn't leave our house until a bit after 3 pm, and picked up at Hoboken about an hour later. Traffic to Ithaca wasn't particularly bad, although there were some slow patches. We stopped at McDonald's at New Milford, PA before continuing. It was probably okay for us to bring along two kids to the hotel, but another adult may be problematic. We managed. I still had my lingering cough, and Courtyard has this chair and ottoman that I could spend the night in.
Lunch at McDonald's in New Milford, PA.
In room at Courtyard Ithaca.
Accommodations: Courtyard Airport Ithaca (1 night).
Monday April 8. Up until a few days prior, weather forecast was ideal for solar eclipse watching. The forecasts the last few days, however, have been calling for more and more cloud cover.
I woke up around 6:30 am to attend the conference call with folks from Brisbane (it's 9 pm for them). For that I went to the sitting area by the lobby. My headset wasn't working, so everyone could hear my speakers, so it's a good thing very few people were around that early.
Anne was all excited as we take the kids to different locations on and around the Cornell campus, including the suspension bridge, Sapsucker Woods, College Town, and Steward Park.
Suspension Bridge.
Arts Quad.
Beebe Lake.
Stewart Park.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
We agonized over whether we should keep our plan to head up to Geneva and experience the full eclipse, or drive down to Scranton with it's relatively good forecast and experience a partial eclipse. The decision was to head north.
We didn't drive all the way to Geneva as we saw many cars parked near a school and decided to join them. It was a good location. Not too crowded, access to the bathrooms at school (turns out to be Northeast College of Health Sciences, located in Seneca Falls), and unobstructed views of the sky. For this day it's the clouds. We did see glimpses of the last moments before full eclipse. There was no way we could see the full eclipse, but a strange darkness fell over us quickly and left after a couple of minutes. I don't recall it being so dark when we were in Nashville for the 2017 eclipse. Faulty memory, or perhaps the lights at the airport provided the illumination?
As to unusual animal behavior, I do think the Canada geese were quite "confused." Many started flying when the eclipse ended.
Taken at 2:50 pm. Still some possibility sun will poke through.
At 3:05 pm. Sky is getting cloudier.
Taken at 3:20 pm, when eclipse was total. The camera works much better than the human eye in these dark conditions.
The school campus is nice.
Northeast College of Health Sciences located in Seneca Falls, NY.
We encountered a few traffic jams on the way back, and the drive was longer as we started from about 45 minutes north of Ithaca.
Anne's opinion is any time we get "stuck" with our kids and grandkids for any length of time, is a good day.
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