Until last week I had only ever seen one eclipse before: the annular eclipse of June 1984, which had a path of totality which passed just north of New Orleans, my hometown. That one was pretty neat, so a few years ago when my wife and I learned about the coast-to-coast 2017 eclipse, we started making plans to watch it.
We considered various places along the path of totality, and eventually picked Charleston, South Carolina, as the place to watch the eclipse. We reserved a rental cottage in late 2016, well before all but the nerdiest of popular-science media had started talking about the coming eclipse. (We are sometimes cunning.)
Why Charleston? Various reasons, including the fact that we both have family members who live on the way there, so we could combine the eclipse trip with visits to them. Also the fact that Charleston is an interesting city with a lot of other attractions — so even if the day of the eclipse turned out rainy we'd still have a nice vacation.
We set out on August 17, traveling through Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and a corner of West Virginia all in one day of gonzo driving, before stopping for the night in Winchester, Virginia. I'd been there before — a stop for lunch during an earlier cross-country drive, and knew it was a lovely old town with some good restaurants. Rain kept us from doing much walking about, unfortunately, but we did have a good dinner and slept well.
On the 18th we cruised south through the Shenandoah Valley in glorious weather, and at Roanoke turned southeast to head for North Carolina. If the signs are to be believed, there are plans afoot to build an interstate between Roanoke and Greensboro in North Carolina. The traffic on the little two-lane blacktop highway suggests that a bigger road is overdue on that route . . . but I hope the new interstate won't mean the little towns along the way wind up getting bulldozed.
We visited relatives in Greensboro, and spent the night there. Then, off again in the morning! Our course took us southeast on back roads, as the traffic report indicated some kind of massive accident and traffic jam on I-95. Besides, we had plenty of time and this let us see the scenery of tiny old farming towns.
By mid-day we were getting close to the South Carolina line — and getting hungry. The solution seemed obvious: stop at the next grubby little down-home ultra-authentic small-town Carolina barbecue joint we came across.
Unfortunately, we made an unhappy discovery: there aren't actually very many grubby little down-home ultra-authentic small-town Carolina barbecue joints left in that part of the Carolinas. We passed a couple of closed ones, and one burned-down one, but it wasn't until we reached the enormous commercial strip at the I-95 junction in Florence, South Carolina that we actually found a barbecue place, which looked exactly like all the other fast-food restaurants there. No down-home authenticity. The food was good, though, and we didn't have to worry about ultra-authentic down-home bacteria, so that was all right.
Comfortably stuffed with pulled pork we covered the remaining miles to Charleston, and met a different set of relatives at the rental cottage.
Next Time: An Old Time in the Hot Town.
If you want to read about one place I have been to, and another I have never visited because I made it up, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!
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