Eclipsed Expectations!

How often do events EXCEED your expectations?  Rarely for me.  Really I’m happy if it approaches my expectation.  So here come’s Monday’s solar eclipse…let me step back a few steps to set it up first.

We were in Texas on business, my wife’s organization, with a conference in San Antonio.  Since Monday was my birthday, we extended our stay and joined friends at their home in Granbury TX on Sunday.  The Monday plan was for R&R and a Rangers vs Astros game in Arlington (my first MLB game in a dome BTW…pretty dang cool).

Low and behold the universe had a solar eclipse planned with the path passing directly over Granbury TX on Monday April 8th.  Initially, when planning the trip, the only indicator we had that something was going on was the cost of hotel rooms that weekend.  Who knew!?!

We picked up our eclipse viewing glasses (do we put a lot of faith in those flimsy things or what?) on the way to Granbury Sunday.  Monday we parked ourselves in lawn chairs a little after noon local time.  We had mostly cloudy skies and I thought “bummer”.  But then!  The clouds began to thin as the moon’s shadow took it’s first bites out of El Sol. That’s when the construction project down the street ceased operations.  Virtually all vehicle traffic stopped, pulled over to watch.  It was eerily quiet. The color of our surroundings began to change…hard to describe.

Then it rapidly became dark.  Not pitch black, but dark like an evening with a waning crescent moon. See the pics below.  The birds stopped singing.  The crickets started chirping.  The stars came out!  The only sound was dogs barking and our oohs & ahhs.

I lost track of time, but I think the real darkness lasted about 4 minutes.  Then the moon went on it’s merry way, the sky went back to normal and we spent the next two days talking about it…with everyone!  Some probably didn’t like it and I understand. Imagine pre-historic man or even isolated people/tribes in remote places today witnessing this occurrence!

It was a shared encounter where human beings were not in charge.  I liked that feeling.  All of us in the path experienced it and wanted to talk about it.  I liked that too.  One of the rare times when the actual definition of awesome applies.