Solar Eclipse - The Day Before

We woke up the next morning with the sun shining in the window – what a great way to wake up. Josh and Jen did some circuit training (interesting at altitude!) and Bill, Sally and I headed down to the Nerd YMCA for Nia. I got to meet Kelly their teacher and some of their tribe, and then I taught Cell-ebrate. They were a great group to teach to and I did fine with breathing and teaching at altitude. Afterwards Kelly invited the class to her house for pre-eclipse mimosas and pastries.

Meanwhile Dave and the kids went down to Casper for miniature golf (Josh won) and lunch. We ended up all getting back to the cabin at the same time. We spent the afternoon napping and getting ready to head up to the viewing site. We loaded up our trucks and left the cabin around 4. The road to the site, Bill and Sally’s land on Casper Mt, is quite interesting! Our expedition had the lowest clearance, but we all made it just fine. There was so much rocking and rolling that Telly, the collapsible 10” telescope, almost broke free of his seatbelt, so I spent the last 100 yards or so hanging on to him. It’s possible that at some point on the drive in, the expedition suffered an injury that would prove fatal.

Once we arrived we got to meet the famous potty shed and wow, is it worth meeting! It even has windows with curtains. Later on, however, Sally discovered that women should not use the potty shed with phones in their pockets.

No lasting ill-effects for the phone, fortunately, and Sally didn’t seem to traumatized either. We spent a while setting up our tent, then went for a walk to the “front porch”, an overlook. It has lots of “measles rocks”, aka rocks with concretions, and tilted rock beds, and a great view. Altogether satisfactory.

Meanwhile, thunderclouds were building up all around. Bill & Sally had brought a sun shelter, so we set it up over the picnic table (that Bill built) and started to have dinner. It was getting wetter and windier, so we tied the shelter down to four cinderblocks. And then a giant wind came! It blew over the wine glass and the wine bottle and the container with the salad in it! We’d all leapt up to hold onto the poles, so the shelter didn’t blow away, but I did have a momentary vision of myself clinging to the pole as I sailed up and over the landscape. All the tents survived, although I watched ours get pretty flat. Then the gust subsided and everything was back to normal, and the rain moved off and we opened another bottle of wine. We ate cookies and gummy things and drank wine and chatted as it got darker and slowly began to clear up.

Once it was dark we noticed an amazing sight – the line ofcars heading for Muddy Gap and Casper. They were still coming in when we went to bed after 10, and Sally said they were still coming in when she got up at 6. Eventually some big enough holes opened up the clouds, and Dave introduced Bill and Sally to observing.  It was a great night for it, with no moon (of course!) and both Saturn and Jupiter visible. Josh and Dave enjoyed tour guiding through their favorite objects. Then it was bedtime, and after discovering the that slope was sloppier than we thought and there was a bad lump on Dave’s side, we swapped all of the setup to the other sides (the lump wasn’t in a place that bothered me) and unzipped our sleeping bags to sleep directly on the pads (less slidy that having the sleeping bags on the pads). We both slept surprisingly well, except for the part where I woke up thinking it was raining and something was trying to eat the tent.