After over 50 years of waiting, I got my chance to view total solar eclipse. I wasn't going to at least attempt to fight the predicted massive traffic problems through the state of Oregon and the city of Portland. As I talked about it the last few weeks, I think Deanna was surprised to find out that if she went to work, I was going to Oregon to see the total eclipse some way or somehow. After hearing all the hype on the news for a few weeks she was closer to thinking that maybe it might be better than what she was imagining.
She took the day off so together we could attempt to see the total eclipse. If we had stayed home, we would have been able to see 98.7%, but being only about 35 miles away from totality, I was determined to give it a try.
The reports were that traffic would be a nightmare all day so many businesses had their employees work from home or closed for the day in the Portland area. When we got up, we were surprised to see that Portland was "green" all over the city. We planned to go to the SW of Portland to avoid I-5 entirely. There's a way to get all the way around the northwest side and ending up in Hillsboro (far west suburb) where we planned to go south from there. As it was, we went right through the city in the AM at about 6:45, a time when it's usually backed up at the Columbia River Bridge on I-5.
We had a relatively easy drive using a GPS app called WAZE, which routed us a bit farther west, then south and got us to Mcminnville in enough time to look around for a good place to park. The plan was to go south to a rural area and find a farm that might be charging to park in their field, or go to Linfield College in the city where they had a viewing event and free parking. We drove by that area with the thought that if we couldn't find a suitable place, we'd head back into the south side of the city to Linfield.
As it was, we headed south, found a busy fruit stand with a porta-potty and continued a couple miles farther where people were parking in various fields attached to the HWY for free. Found a spot and waited.
We had had our eclipse glasses for weeks, had some extras and when some recalls came out on Amazon and the Dutch Bros. coffee giveaway glasses made some scramble for glasses we were able to sell some which eventually paid for the ten we bought (4 went to Luke and Katie) plus enough for our lunch on the way back. We had purchased ones from companies on NASA's approved list. They were rather interesting in that if you looked through them, you say nothing. Sort of like looking through a welder's mask. However, looking at the sun, all you saw was the sun. I may take them apart, make a camera filter and see if I can photograph sunspots some time soon.
In any event, we watched for an hour as the sun got covered more and more by the moon and then that 50 seconds of seeing the corona flare out from the sun was ....
To say it was amazing would be an understatement.
After a few minutes, we got packed up and headed back, watching the traffic on google maps and our WAZE app. Traffic wasn't bad so we stopped in to Great Harvest Bread Company for a sample and a loaf of cinnamon bread and a pit stop since we had been drinking coffee all morning. When we got back in the Chevy Silverado, traffic past the bread store was backed up into town as well as the four to five little towns along the way, however, our app rerouted us in McMinnville two blocks off the main drag and we zipped easily past the packed downtown with traffic lights every two blocks. As we approached the first of the little towns on the state hwy, we were rerouted again through some back roads and had an easy enjoyable ride through the country side on roads we have never been on before and most likely won't every again. Well, come to think of it, maybe we will because there are oodles of wineries along those roads and we plan some day to go back down there with our friends Mel and Carolyn from Olympia for a winery tour.
All this time, we expected to have to take the back way around the NW part of Portland, but the traffic still showed green all over the city. However, I-5 out of Salem was a mess. Salem had almost 2 minutes of totality as it was in the middle of the moon's shadow. We had less than a minute as we were near the edge of the shadow.
We stopped in Hillsboro at a Vietnamese place for lunch and took the back way, not because traffic was backed up, but I wanted to show Deanna the way for future reference. We made it home with no trouble at all. The folks on I-5 and those in central Oregon who watched on the high desert near Bend on the east side of the Cascades didn't have it so carefree.
Madras, a small town north of Bend, was "dark red" all day into the evening. Traffic reports were on the local news stations all night. The mass of traffic finally made it up into Washington after 6 PM. I-5 near our exit here in Ridgefield was red in parts and orange to the north and south.
My hunch of picking a place away from Salem to the SW of Portland seemed to be a fortunate guess as we made it home in about three hours. Not bad since we stopped for a sit-down lunch and then did some grocery shopping (We're in a bedroom community with no large grocery store so we have have to remember to stop for items on the way home from work or trips south) on the way home. So total drive time home was probably an hour and a half. Not far in miles, but slow due to being on back roads is all.
Attached is a photo I took of the area we parked. I tried to take photos with my cell phone through the solar filter glasses but they didn't really come out. If i had a solar filter for my camera, it would have taken too long to figure out the correct aperture, ISO, and shutter speed settings. I would have missed the sight of a lifetime and probably the picture as well. Decided it was best to just soak it in and rely on the professionals' photos. I've seen some and the photos just can't capture what it really looked like. Case in point, ever try photographing the Grand Canyon?
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