I told you about Saturday already. So on Sunday we got up and went to church. There were people everywhere, but honestly, not as many as we thought there might be. We explored Sugar City (that means I took a nap while my sweetie wandered all over with the kids). We visited with family and played games.
We tried to get the kids to bed early, but they were way too excited. They finally settled down when we turned off all the lights. Morning brought a restless group, so my sweetie walked down to the festival with the kids. We had already decided we wanted to just be by ourselves when we watched the eclipse rather than in a large crowd of people.
We set up in the front yard and I read to the kids while we waited. Every 10 minutes or so we would put on our glasses and watch the progress of the sun. The Dog Walker kept saying, "Is the temperature dropping yet?" We assured him it wasn't although by the time the eclipse was over it had dropped 17 degrees.
Time approached and finally we had totality. We pulled off our glasses and for a couple of minutes we were able to look directly at the sun. It looked like it had a ring of fire around it. A flock of bats flew over the house. We shivered with the temperature drop and the kids turned in circles so they could see the 360-degree sunset. We could hear screaming and cheering from the park in the eerie dusk.
All too soon the celestial ring appeared and we put our glasses back on. One of the kids pointed out the crescent-shaped shadows of the leaves and my sweetie pointed out that his shadow was different too. We gathered up and walked back down to the park to enjoy the festivities.
People had moved quickly and already the pictures showed the freeway backed up. We loaded our van and waited until 4:00, hoping things would have thinned out a bit.
It took us 2 hours to drive about 30 miles, so we got off the freeway in Ammon and saw a movie and ate dinner. Just after 9:00 pm we pulled back onto the freeway. The first little bit was pretty good and we were hopeful, but it wasn't long before we were in stop and go traffic.
We finally arrived home just before 3:00 AM. My sweetie did a great job behind the wheel and Crafty managed to still get up for her first day of school. It was definitely an amazing trip and well worth the time and money invested.
Now it's back to real life.
So happy that you had this experience with your awesome family. Loved the photos and thoughts. My son lives in Sugar City. If we weren't on a mission we would have been there. We did get to see it due to not getting glasses soon enough. We did try to take a selfie with the fun behind us but we aren't good at that. We felt the temperature drop but not to the degreeit was there.
ReplyDeleteHappy you are home safe and sound after a long drive home. Wow, that was really long.
Blessings and hugs!