They booked a downtown hotel 2 blocks from the Children's Museum of the Upstate. We wound up out in the suburbs. We both only booked for the night of Aug 20. After reading about the possible traffic jam and seeing that there were some things to do in Greenville, we also booked for Aug 19, but could not get a room for Aug 21. They were leaving after the eclipse anyway, going to Great Wolf Lodge, some huge water park near Charlotte that was on their way home. We wound up booking the night of Aug 21 at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville NC, 60 miles north. We've stayed there before, it's a cool place.
We got to Greenville late Saturday afternoon. That evening we were treated to a parade down Main Street of 8 pickup trucks flying the confederate and neo-nazi flags. They parked at the large downtown Springwood Cemetery, where someone had placed small confederate flags on the graves of confederate soldiers. This plaque was just outside the cemetery.
The note at the bottom says that this thing was put up in 1961 by the Confederate Centennial Commission. So 100 years later, with the civil rights movement heating up, they put up a plaque expressing "reverence and admiration" for the "courage and integrity" of the 5 local signers of SC's articles of secession in 1860. I'm sure the signers were all slave owners, quite willing to rend the US asunder and sacrifice 100,000s of lives to protect the huge capital investment represented by their slaves. I'm sure the African-American residents of Greenville County at the time of the erection of this plaque agreed whole-heartedly with its sentiments - yah, right.
This stuff, and all the statues, needs to go. Slavery is inarguably the worst institution in the history of human civilization. Germany after WW2 did it right in their handling of Nazism. No sentimentality, no romanticization. Just get rid of it, assign those memes to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Sunday we went to the Greenville Zoo in the morning. A surprisingly good zoo - the animals were really active. There was a male lion pacing just beyond a sheet of plexiglass, making for great photo-ops. The howler monkeys were going crazy.
In the afternoon we walked around downtown. They have done a good job with their Main St, 8-10 tree-lined blocks with lots of benches, restaurants, shops, some statuary, and a few buskers. Falls Park on the Reedy had a cool bridge over the falls of the Reedy River. Here's the falls.
At the entrance to Falls Park there was an attractive young woman reading aloud. Cool, I thought, thinking it was poetry. As we go by her and can hear her clearly, oops, she's reading the bible. I told my son "Disappointing, I was hoping for some poety, but it's just the fucking bible." A young man nearby turned to me and asked "What's wrong with the bible?" Not wanting to spent hours enumerating the bible's many faults, we ignored him. Ugh. Next eclipse we will go north rather than further into the bible belt.
The restaurants we ate at had interesting looking dishes, none of which wounded up tasting like much. I'm sure their kitchens were overwhelmed by the volume, and, additionally, had probably not had much of a chance to make a lot of these dishes before.
Monday, the day of the eclipse, we were in line at 8:45 waiting for the Children's Museum to open at 9:00. We spent the morning there. It was a surprisingly good Children's Museum, 3 floors, and no exhibits on Bible Science, hooray!
We went out onto the lawn of the museum for the eclipse. It was 93 degrees, so we found a place were we could stand under a tree in the shade and then step out, put on our glasses, look at the developing eclipse, and step back into the shade. And when we got too hot, we'd duck back inside the Children's Museum and cool off in the air conditioning for a few minutes.
The sky was totally cooperating - we had maybe 5 minutes of clouds blocking the sun during the 90 minutes leading up to the totality, and no clouds during the 2 minutes 10 seconds of the totality. Up until the totality, it was still surprising light, but you could feel how much cooler on your skin the sunlight was. Someone mentioned the crescent shadows that the tree leaves were throwing. Way cool, here's a pic.
The totality was absolutely awesome. A ring of fire in the sky. I wasted 20 seconds trying 2x to take a picture, but the corona was still bright enough that the pix were overexposed. In the blackness that fell you could see Mercury near the sun and Jupiter 1/2 way to the horizon, along with stars. I've seen Mercury a few times before, but always just above the horizon at dusk or dawn - it is after all very close to the sun. To see it overhead was so weird.
Afterwards I wished I had had 2 or 3 copies of myself so I could have taken more in. I didn't particularly notice any changes in birdsong, or other odd animal behavior.
After the totality we watched 10 minutes or so of the sun reappearing, and kind of said, well, this is going to be just like the last 90 minutes but in reverse. So we said our goodbyes and left. We walked 4 blocks to where our car was parked, got it out of the parking garage, and headed for Asheville. Our route took us past the Children's Museum lawn, and it had almost completely emptied. Apparently everyone felt pretty much like we did.
The trip to Asheville was supposed to take 1h 15m. We did some detouring and made it in 2h 20m - not too bad.
We had a great dinner at Grove Park Inn. Here's the view from our room.
My wife did some shopping Tuesday morning and then we headed home around 11am. Except for some construction, traffic was normal. So the "largest traffic jam in US history" was largely avoided. It did take the NC contingent around 5 hours to go what should have taken 2.5 hours on Monday.
This trip was definitely worthwhile. The ring of fire in the sky was totally otherworldly, I'm totally glad I got to see it before I die.
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