Weekend Plans Post: A Little Cloud Cover is Not the End of the World

ROADTRIP! Well, we hit the road first thing in the morning on Saturday and made it all the way to Lubbock. We settled down for the night and drove to San Antonio the next day and prepared for the eclipse.

First off, that involved getting some Texas Bar-B-Q. As we walked up to the door, there was a guy whose job it was to yell “WE’RE OUT OF BRISKET!” and a handful of people walking alongside us turned on their heel and left. I ordered the chopped beef and the smoked sausage and some artichoke dip for the table.

It was all out of this world. I had forgotten how much bees love Bar-B-Q, though. They were swarming around like we had real sugar lemonade.

After bedtime, we woke up bright and early and got in the car and started discussing where we wanted to go. “Hey, there’s an H.E.B.! We can go to the potty, grab some sandwich fixings, and camp out!” Well, a security guard quietly told us that he was there waiting on a tow truck to get a couple of cars towed and one of the other security guards was fired that morning for not being enthusiastic enough about towing freeloaders who thought that they could park all day in the parking lot just because they bought something.

Okay. Fine.

We got on our maps and drove on over to Lady Bird Johnson Park and set up our folding chairs and made some sandwiches and hoped that, despite the cloud cover, the eclipse would peek through.

Now one thing that I’ll say is that the eclipse I caught in Wyoming was downright ideal. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun looked like it was huge. The size of a dime. The corona of the total eclipse was terrifying and beautiful.

This eclipse down in San Antonio had plenty of clouds. The sun looked smaller. Like the size of a pencil eraser. There were enough clouds to hide the sun a handful of times. We worried that we’d miss some of the totality (as it turns out, we had good reason to). Then the moon showed up and started taking bites out of the sun.

I realize that the pictures do not do this justice but, seriously, the sun was down to about half in the first one and one-third in the second.

And then the clouds hit.

One thing that was a little more magical this time was due to the clouds. I saw a beautiful sunset and then, a couple of minutes later, a beautiful sunrise. Back in 2017, we saw the line of the shadow of the moon run toward us and then run away in the fields surrounding the little rest stop we stopped at and that was cool… but the sunset followed by a sunrise minutes later? That was really beautiful.

And, yeah, the eclipse peeked out a couple of times between sunset and sunrise.

Back in 2017, I felt terror as I saw the sun get devoured. I didn’t feel that this time. It was merely beautiful and wonderful.

Then we hopped back in the car and started driving to make sure we could get home Tuesday night and get back to work like normal on Wednesday.

Which we did.

The next eclipse happens in 2045.

That’s not *DIRECTLY* over my house… but I could see having a conversation about whether we want to do more than just put our folding chairs out on the front porch and deciding “nah”.

This weekend will be spent CATCHING UP after frivolously running off to Texas for a weekend like there weren’t a kabillion chores that constantly need doing. (It’s time to swap out the seasonal clothing!)

So… what’s on your docket?

(Featured image is the eclipse peeking out. Photo taken by the author.)

Still here? Okay. There was one really funny thing that happened on the drive home. We got to the town where we were staying and said that we wanted some local food. There was a Chinese/Thai fusion place down in a local strip mall and we decided that we wanted to put in an order to go. We walked in and the wallpaper by the front door was a decade’s worth of photos of the local high school girls volleyball team. Hey, this place has been around 10 years, right? A pillar of the community, right?

Well, lemme tell ya, this was the worst Chinese/Thai fusion that I have ever had. It was like something that would show up in a bad sitcom. How in the heck had this place stayed open for 10 years? There weren’t *THAT* many girls on the volleyball team. I did my best to be a good sport and I ate most of my Sweet & Sour Chicken (how do you mess up Sweet & Sour Chicken?) and a good portion of the bright red sesame chicken and my teriyaki steak skewers were edible (how do you mess up teriyaki steak skewers?) and, my goodness, I was glad when my buddy said “I’m going to McDonald’s”.

He came back and said “There’s something wrong with this town. Try a fry.” and I tried one of the McDonald’s fries and they were unsalted. In their entirety.

For the first time in my life, I had a McDonald’s fry that had never seen salt. It wasn’t very good.

So, we concluded that the town was cursed. We will never go there again.