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EggInDisguise@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I drove what should have been a 2 hour trip in 4 hours to see the 2017 one.

I figured “let’s get some lunch, walk around some local parks, and maybe go walk around the local shops for a few hour before trying to go home” because I knew traffic would be bad. I even spent most of an afternoon plotting my course back home to avoid major roads and highways.

Even after 5ish hours, traffic was terrible. Every highway we passed was stopped. People were flooding back roads, it was slow but moving faster than the highways.

12 hours later, I pulled into my driveway and decided next time I ever travel for an eclipse, I’m bringing a tent and staying a few days.

It took some friends if mine 14 hours to get home and they didn’t even leave their state.

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Zoomboingding@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I must have been lucky in 2024 then. Drove 8 hours to see it, stayed until about an hour after totality, took about 10 hours to get back. Not bad considering it was 500 miles one-way.

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- LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Drove a few hours for both the 2017 and 2024 eclipse.
  
  Waited several hours afterwards to go home both times.
  
  The 2024 eclipse was a much easier drive home (though still not great).
  
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Fondots@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we’re off to Iceland for another.

We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.

I don’t remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.

Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I’m not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.

For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.

We’ll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.

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Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I drove seven hours to TN to get maximum totality. The drive home was 14 hours. Just a sea of cars as far as the eye could see.

Worth it.

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Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I took the train from Mississippi to Illinois for the last one I saw. Had to wait a bit for the train going back since it was scheduled for something like 1AM the morning after the eclipse, but I just found a quiet spot in the local college’s activity center to nap until then. Was definitely much more enjoyable than driving would have been, I think.

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