I wound up making an 800-mile day trip yesterday, from the Chicago area down to Princeton, Kentucky and back. It was absolutely Worth. The. Trip. to go… and I lucked out on the weather. About 40 miles north of me, there was a towering thunderhead, but no storms headed my way. The effect of totality is downright spooky; 360-degree twilight is a sight to see.
Lesson learned: take a DSLR instead of a point-and-shoot - you need full manual control of focus, shutter speed, and aperture, and I couldn’t get a manual-focus mode out of my point-and-shoot. At least I won’t have to travel as far for the 2024 eclipse.
Southbound traffic on I-57 in the morning was moderately heavy but not bad. I did a fair bit of back-roading on the way home, and that turned out well. It was amusing to see small parades of cars on rarely-traveled county blacktops. I stopped for dinner in Champaign and then Google Maps kindly routed me around a bad jam on I-57 between Rantoul and Paxton.
