T Stands for the Eclipse

 Hi everyone. And Happy T day to the ladies who join in over at Bleuebard's and Elizabeth's blog for our weekly T day.

     It seems like last week's T day was a long time ago to me. We had a big snowstorm last Thursday which made last week feel like it was 2  different weeks, before the snow and after the snow. And then yesterday my husband and I took a road trip to go see the total solar eclipse that was heading across the country and went through far northern  New England. 

     Neither my husband nor myself had seen a total solar eclipse before. I've seen eclipses where the sun is partially blocked by the moon (in 2017 and then back sometime before that), but since this total eclipse was close enough to get to in a day's road trip,  we packed a lunch, some chairs and even the dogs (not that they cared about the eclipse) and decided to drive north.

    We had a couple of choices, including going north right here in New Hampshire, but we decided to drive just south of Burlington, Vermont. The problem with the northern part of our state is that there are not a lot of connecting roads in northern New Hampshire  due to the thick forest and low population base. Plus those roads are only 2 lanes, one going in each direction.  By going to Vermont we could take the highway which although wasn't moving super fast on the way home, at least can handle a whole lot of cars.

     Plus, Vermont has a great park and ride system where you could pull off and watch the eclipse. 😏

    We left quite early and managed to get a great parking spot before the park and ride filled up, as you can see in the first photo. Here's my husband making himself a sandwich for lunch. It is also my drink photo for T day as you can see we had a gallon of water on the right hand side for our drinks.

     You can also see it was a beautiful day. We hit 60 degrees F or 15.5 degrees C. By the time the eclipse started the lot was full as you can see in the area around my car in the photo below. 

I bought a solar filter for my camera and did some playing around during the eclipse. I got a few good photos, although I really should have brought my tripod. 😞

Here's a couple.

And then it got dark. That was one of the most amazing things I have seen.

You can see that the streetlights in the park and ride came on (which is the glare on the right side of my photo as I haven't had time to do much editing). And it got noticeably colder. 

It seems strange there was not enough light to get some color in the above photo even at total coverage. At that point we could not only take off our eclipse glasses and look at the sun, but I could take the filter off my camera. In this next photo I digitally added some color to give you a somewhat approximation of how it looked.

Then we started what was a long drive home. Traffic didn't stop, but it was very slow in spots.   However, people were patient and driving through Vermont is always beautiful.

And that's all for my latest adventure.  I hope everyone has a happy T day and week ahead too.