Writing up my 2024 travel memories post made me realize I have yet to blog about our trip to see the solar eclipse last April! It was a quick trip and thus this will be a quick post, but I wanted to make sure to document it somewhere, both because eclipses are awesome and because we ended up really liking downtown Evansville.
We picked Evansville over a year in advance somewhat randomly. It was one of the closest spots to us that would see totality, so we found a nice looking Airbnb and grabbed it. And then spent the next year worrying that the owner would cancel on us when she saw other places jacking their prices up for the eclipse. But she didn’t! Thanks Airbnb owner! (We actually ended up getting ANOTHER Airbnb when Ari decided to come because ours only slept 4).
This trip was…a lot logistically. The eclipse happened on the Monday after Dave’s spring break, which meant that he wasn’t really supposed to take a personal day. But he asked his principal about it before the school year even started and was given the okay to take the day off. But this meant he would need to drive home (nearly 400 miles) right after the eclipse happened in the late afternoon so he would be at work the next morning. August was a senior in high school, so we also needed to use spring break for college visits. In the end, August and I spent the week before the eclipse touring midwestern colleges, Dave and Abe spent a couple of days camping in north Georgia, and then we all met up in Evansville the day before the eclipse. Except Milo, who went back and forth until the last minute deciding if he could miss school and ultimately ended up going to another city with friends as a day trip.
So! We were all in place the evening before the eclipse and set out to explore downtown Evansville (which was within walking distance of our Airbnb, although we drove that first evening because of rain in the forecast). Evansville is super cute! I knew nothing about it before this trip, but it’s actually the third biggest city in Indiana. It sits right on the Ohio River, and there’s a long park in town that goes along the river. The main street through the downtown area has clearly seen some recent revitalization, and it was bustling when we were there (not surprising given the eclipse, of course).
We spent awhile wandering around and then ate dinner at BRU Burger Bar, hiply located inside an old Greyhound bus station:
The eclipse wasn’t until late afternoon the next day, so we spent the morning back downtown, checking out the River Kitty Cat Cafe.
And then eclipse time! The Airbnb was just a couple of blocks away from the river, so we walked over there to take in the eclipse with a whole lot of other people.
I have a whole post about the last solar eclipse in the US and why one should absolutely make an effort to get to totality when one happens, so I won’t go into so much detail this time (also, you have a lot longer to wait this time before another US eclipse). I will reiterate that eclipses are amazing and like nothing else you can experience. But I’ll also say that both Dave and I felt like one’s first eclipse is one’s best eclipse…there’s something about being surprised by the first eclipse you’ve seen that really adds to the experience. But it was still absolutely worth making the trip (and, FWIW, the older kids did not agree with our assessment, maybe because they were younger for their first eclipse and maybe the memory wasn’t as vivid for them).
The park on the river was a great place to watch the eclipse (and we lucked out with totally clear skies after some worry as we watched the forecast in the days leading up to it), but we could have done without the religious zealots with speakers proclaiming loudly about the end of the world.
And then it was over! Eclipses are fast! We walked back to the Airbnb and looked at the funny shadows:
Then Dave, Ari, and August had to take off for the long drive home. We were worried that traffic would be awful, but for the most part it wasn’t bad for them and made it home at a semi-reasonable hour. Abe and I stayed an extra night since we didn’t have anything we urgently needed to get home for.
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