We’re not Stupid, We’re Prepared
April 8, 2024 – Day 23
Giant City State Park, Makanda Illinois
Today is the day! Eclipse day! We clicked and clicked and clicked on our weather apps. Susan eventually hit the lottery and got enough information back from the internets to find out it was probably going to be great! Of course, we couldn’t do anything if we needed to. That was one great thing about our first site in Junction, Texas. It was in the middle of no where. If you needed to drive 200 miles it’s easy to do. Right now we were in between St. Louis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville and Memphis. Millions of people, would be day tripping to the exact same area we would want to be. This would be the exact opposite of Junction TX.
Paul set up his ham radio around 10AM to partake in the Gladstone Signal Spotting Challenge. He hoped he would join hundreds of other ham doing real science. Would ham radio propagation be affected by totality. His station would emit very low powered signals until the afternoon and others would be listening for those signals. This is interesting to nerds like Paul because different ham bands (aka frequencies) behave differently during the day than at night. For example, 40 meters is good far a couple of hundred miles during the day, and thousands at night. 20m is good for thousands during the day and is often dead at night. So science!
Paul went over to talk to horseman Rick to talk about the Bonaire license plate that Rick had wondered about and to give him an extra pair of good eclipse glasses. Really, we can’t make this stuff up. Paul came back and told Susan “You know, we might not need to walk out to the field.” Apparently, Rick had been watching the small grassy field between his trailer and the bathrooms for a few days now and there were clear lines of sight to where the eclipse would happen. At this point there were already lots of chairs setup there.
So we unpacked our lunches and water and snacks, sauntered over to the grassy knoll about 100 yards (instead of 1.7 mile round trip!) and 45 minutes before 1st contact.
We were greeted by the tin-foil hat crowd.
We were with a crowd of pleasantly drunk folks, with moon and sun cookies (susan here: did you know that moon pies originated in Chattanooga, TN? We did because we’d just visited Chattanooga.) They had some sort of weird, layered drinks. All of them were wearing tin foil hats of various elaborate (and not so elaborate) designs.
They wanted a group photo so Paul volunteered to go into their compound and shoot if for them. He had great lines to make them smile, like “Aliens are real” and “the moon is fake.” etc… they ate it up
Soon, everyone was wearing tin foil. (susan here, soon they badgered everyone, playfully of course, into wearing them) What fun. “We’re not stupid. We’re just prepared.” was their motto. After totality we also checked on our neighbors to make sure nobody was abducted, and more importantly (!) that we didn’t have any extra people!
Paul got accepted by the tin-foil tribe by putting his colander on his head, and warning them that tin-foil wasn’t enough.
You needed a colander to make the pin hole camera!
Notice the Darkest Hour Black Cherry soda? Greg and Anna gave us one. (Along with an invite to their place in Mt. Olive if we’re ever passing through.) How did they know that Paul has a weird desire to drink the local weird sodas he finds across the USA.
Darkest Hour is made by a local IL soda company and supposedly the bottle glows in the dark. We need to test that. It was about as sweet as Cheer Wine, but it wasn’t Cheer Wine. But man, was it sweet.
As for the eclipse, words are hard to describe it. It was amazing beyond amazing. Not totality, then totality, then not totality was like someone was playing with the light switch. The 360° horizon of sunset was super cool too. We never saw the Baily’s Beads or the diamond ring. But we did see real solar prominences. It was super cool. (susan here: To say it was stunning beyond words would be like saying Mt. Everest is short.)
Prior to the eclipse, Paul had rigged up solar filters over both our binoculars. During totality that made the prominence easy to see but during totality if you choose to do it you could also see it with the naked eye. The corona was equally amazing. We wish we had better words than amazing. Click the link for more amazing words.
The rest of the day, well, it doesn’t really matter. Today exceeded all expectations.