In the Path of Totality
Remembering 2017
Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
“When you pack for your trip include a 5 gallon bucket of patience.”—the National Operations Center of Excellence, Kentucky: Lessons learned from 2017 Solar Eclipse
Betsy Cross
Hopkinsville, Kentucky was identified as “the town closest to the epicenter of the Great American Eclipse,” ground zero for the 2017 August solar eclipse.
It was an opportunity of synchronicity. My coworker, Tim Liddell, and I were traveling around the state of Kentucky in 2017, meeting with healthcare administrators and rolling out behavioral health software in their hospitals and provider practices.
August 21 fell on a Monday, and we were scheduled to be in Louisville on Tuesday morning. So we would fly into Nashville on Sunday afternoon and drive up to Louisville on Monday, passing through Hopkinsville on the way.
Our plan: drive just an hour from Nashville to Hopkinsville, purchase our eclipse glasses and solar filters for our cameras, grab an early lunch, watch the eclipse for a couple of hours, get back on the road by 3:00 CDT, and be in Louisville by 7:00 EDT at the latest.
It seemed simple enough. We would arrive in plenty of time to check into our hotel, freshen up, and go for a nice dinner at Eddie Merlot’s, our favorite Louisville restaurant. Easy-peasy.
Tracking our expected route on Google Maps from Hopkinsville to Louisville showed an estimated timeline of 2 ½ hours. Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
We left Nashville after breakfast on Monday morning. After a few miles, our rental car began to wobble. Yikes! We pulled over—blown tire. Changing a tire on an unfamiliar vehicle in the middle of August on the shoulder of an exit ramp has its challenges, but Tim’s optimism, sweat, and persistence paid off. I stood by, wringing my hands and making sure he didn’t get clipped by a car rounding the corner too fast. Whew! Within 45 minutes, we were back on the road to Hopkinsville.
The partial eclipse was to begin at 11:56 AM CDT, and the sun was to be completely obscured (in totality) at 1:25 PM CDT. Sure, we were off to a rocky start, and we had no eclipse glasses or solar filters for our Coolpix point-and-shoot cameras, but we’d still have enough time to obtain those essentials once we got to Hopkinsville. We could skip lunch if we had to.
Then we heard it on the radio. Hopkinsville (population 31,000) was expecting over 100,000 visitors. The town was handling it well so far, but things were beginning to pile up. Had they anticipated the crowds? What about the traffic and parking? What about eclipse glasses, lunch, and bathrooms? Yikes again! We were ill-equipped and unprepared. What were we thinking? Suddenly, our plan seemed a little naïve.
But we kept driving. And then, there it was, the nicest roadside park I’d ever seen, and on our side of the highway too. Yes, we have nice ones in Texas, but this was a god-send. There were plenty of parking places at the Christian County Welcome Center. We pulled over. The bathrooms were sparkling clean, and eclipse glasses? They had buckets of them. There were vending machines and friendly Kentucky docents. What a stroke of luck for us. Lunch, eclipse glasses, parking, bathrooms, and friendly people everywhere!
By 12:16 PM, the light had begun to soften. Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
This fellow set up his tripod and telescope with a camera and computer attached. Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
He was the real deal. He’d probably been planning for months! Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
We, on the other hand, had no solar filters for our tiny Coolpix cameras, but that didn’t intimidate us too much. Tim was determined to take the shots even if it damaged his camera sensor. I was a little more worried and figured if we were going to blow up a camera, best to ruin just one and not two. So I took a few pictures of the property and the crescent shadows projected onto the sidewalk by a large tree.
Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
But once it turned completely dark, I could no longer resist. At approximately 1:25 PM, in complete darkness, I pointed my camera toward the eclipsed sun and clicked the shutter.
It’s a poor picture, but I did love the chance to capture my own artifact of totality. If you look closely, you can see a single star on the left and two airplanes crossing in front of the eclipsed sun. Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
The “moment of totality” in Hopkinsville officially began at 1:26 PM and lasted 2 minutes and 41 seconds. I don’t remember anything unusual. I didn’t notice any interesting insect or bird behavior. It was just dark—very dark in the middle of the afternoon. Maybe I was so absorbed by the mysteriousness of the moment that I forgot to notice the things around me.
It took another hour and 22 minutes for the sun to return to full normality. The eclipse ended at 2:51 PM.
We were ready to hit the road again as soon as we could get out of the parking lot. Our Google GPS navigator directed us to avoid the traffic snafus in Hopkinsville by taking an alternate route. And so with everyone else in Christian County who had made it into the path of totality, we began our journey through the backroads of Kentucky.
Tim and I had traveled the backroads before, but not quite like this. We inched along, bumper to bumper on a two-lane road. We zigged and zagged, cutting one way and then another at the next intersection. In retrospect, our route resembled the “kinking” posture of a Texas rat snake. Traveling this route on a good day could take over 3 and a half hours to reach Louisville, but at this rate, well, it was just uncertain.
Our GPS navigator was relentlessly optimistic. She periodically announced that we would be arriving in Louisville at 7:30 PM, only to say the exact same thing an hour later, and then again. I think the 300,000 or so visitors traveling away from the path of totality had scrambled her software.
Using Google Maps, this photo shows our GPS redirected route from the Christian County Welcome Center to Louisville. On an average day, it should have added only one extra hour to our travel time. Photo: courtesy Betsy Cross
We were part of a long caravan of vehicles and really had no idea where we were for the longest time. Several hours passed before we saw signs for Muhlenberg County and Paradise. Country folk sat in lawn chairs in their front yards and on their porches enjoying the parade. They seemed genuinely tickled by our presence, or maybe it was our predicament that amused them. We rolled down our windows and smiled and waved at their friendly, laughing faces. They handed out bottles of water. Children sold lemonade. I bet if we had been desperate enough to ask, any one of them would have welcomed us inside for a pit stop.
Once we made it off the two lane roads and onto the highway, we thought the pace would improve, but it didn’t. Around 9:00 PM, we notified our hotel that we were on our way and should be arriving shortly. Thinking we were going to get a break soon, we just kept pushing on. But that break never happened. I don’t remember stopping to eat or to use the restroom anywhere. In the end, it took us over 9 hours to drive the distance. We checked into our hotel well after midnight.
In April 2018, the National Operations Center of Excellence published a retrospective on the event: Kentucky: Lessons learned from 2017 Solar Eclipse.
Best one-line interview quotes:
This is like the Super Bowl, but without a stadium.
When you pack for your trip include a 5 gallon bucket of patience.
The Kentucky Department of Transportation issued a list of their “biggest surprises:”
Local residents stayed home to avoid the anticipated traffic crunch.
Worst traffic snarl was at the Interstate 69/Western Kentucky Parkway/Pennyrile Parkway interchange with 10-mile backup on the Pennyrile Parkway [northbound out of Hopkinsville].
Traffic counts showed an immediate jump as people headed home from their eclipse adventure.
US 62 through Grayson County [which included our route to Louisville] showed a +123 percent jump in traffic for the day.
My lessons learned from 2017
With all the hype around this year’s event in Central Texas, traffic could easily be worse than it was in Kentucky in 2017.
If you are planning a short day-trip to the nearest path of totality, pack food and drink for the drive home. It will take longer than you think.
If you have animals at home awaiting your return, maybe hire a pet sitter for the day.
With all the construction on I-35, everyone will be seeking a backroad route.
Don’t expect to run to the store and back in the usual way.
Would I do it again? Yes, definitely! It was a memorable day. But this year, I plan to take the pictures from my own backyard.