RV Adventures

Wow.  Just wow.  If you ever have a chance to experience a total solar eclipse, DO IT!

For our eclipse viewing. we were fortunate enough to camp in a cattle pasture of a 15,000 acre ranch.  We didn’t have any neighbors until the night before.  Then our ranks swelled to 4 RVs.  Not exactly overcrowded at all…and that was fine (we’ve heard horror stories about other locations).

Our group of RVs all parked in the cattle pasture, waiting for the solar eclipse

While watching the morning news, they showed how to make a pinhole projector from a cereal box.  Hey…I had a cereal box!  With my crafting skills, I quickly constructed one.

Take a cereal box, foil, tape, a white piece of paper, scissors and a thumb tack.  Viola…a pinhole projector.  Note my snazzy Stapleton Stampede eclipse t-shirt…this WAS the day to wear it!

The eclipse started.  We all put on our glasses and leaned back in our lawn chairs.

Our neighbors from Topeka viewing the eclipse.  They came prepared with an umbrella.

This is inside my pinhole projector halfway through the eclipse.  It really worked!

It is so hard to describe what a total eclipse is like. The temperature dropped, it got a little darker. Excitement built. And the second when the total eclipse happens, you realize you can’t see a thing through your eclipse glasses anymore. So you take them off and WOW! It’s just a ring of light up there. And it has gotten really dark.

I took these two pictures just before and just after totality began.  It’s the only way I can illustrate how dark it got.

This is the best I could do with my point and shoot camera.

Still, for a little hand held camera, it did OK.

During totality, it appeared to be sunset all around on the horizon.

It was the fastest 2 minutes and 33 seconds of our lives. Just as quickly as it began, it ended. It’s like someone flipped a light switch back on. Applause erupted from our small group. Again..WOW! We saw the shadow bands that appear before and after totality. The eclipse glasses went back on, and for a while we watched the moon’s movement again and the eclipse finished up.

Again, it’s hard to describe the experience.  Instead, I found a video of some fellow RVers that were in Oregon watching the eclipse.  If you care to, view the video starting at 4 minute mark. It will give you a sense of what we experienced when totality happened.  If the video below doesn’t work for you, click on this link instead:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkSVVUTTm1U

We had a great time with our new BFFs. They all took off shortly after the eclipse (they weren’t as well set up for dry camping as we are). But we had to document our experience together!

Representing Dallas, Texas; Bryan Texas, Rochester, and Topeka, Kansas….all with our glasses on.  Do we look hot and sweaty and smothered with sun screen?  We were! First thing I did after the party broke up was hit the shower!

So the next total solar eclipse is April 8, 2024. And look, it’s going right over Rochester, New York. But, those of us who live there know that it will probably be cloudy. We plan on being somewhere WITHOUT clouds on that date. It’s already on our calendar. And I saved our eclipse glasses.

On April 8, 2024, we’ll be somewhere along this path of totality for the next total solar eclipse.

The town of Stapleton (population 305) really pulled out the stops for the weekend. They didn’t ask to be right in the path of totality, but embraced the challenge. We attended some of their fun events before the eclipse.

This was our second small town parade this trip.  It was fun to see how it differed from Spencerport’s Fireman’s parade.  There were lots of horses for this town’s parade!

Kristy, our host from the Bar 11 Ranch, gave us free tickets to the rodeo. Most the participants were locals, including her husband and son-in-law.

This is the Chicken Scramble.  All the kids gather in a circle.  Chickens are let loose and the kids try to catch them.  If you catch a chicken, you can turn it in for $5 OR take it home with you.  Yes, some kids took their chickens home.  I hope they already had chicken coops!

As the sun set behind us, we had a thunderstorm off in the distance.  It made for a dramatic sky.

We took some time to drive around the area of the ranch.

We climbed a hill and took a picture of our RV on the Bar 11 Ranch.  That white blob in the upper right-hand corner is our RV!

Zoomed in, you can see where we were parked in relation to the main house.

The prairie sunflowers were everywhere.  This was along the road that cut through the ranch.

This is Nebraska’s idea of an avenue.  You had to be real careful in your travels.  Just because it was on a map, didn’t mean it was easily navigable.

We took a drive into North Platt, Nebraska and visited the “hump yard.”  Going up into the Golden Spike Tower, you get a panoramic view of the Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard.  It is the world’s largest rail yard!

The Golden Spike Tower. From the top you can see the entire rail yard. (picture “borrowed” from their website)

It’s called a hump yard, because they have two humps or mounds that they use to sort cars. An engine pushes a line of cars up the hump. The car at the top of the hump is disconnected and allowed to gently roll down the track on the other side of the hump. The cars are being sorted into based on their destination. There are multiple tracks and switches are thrown via computer to get the train car on the correct set of tracks.  Once all the cars for a destination are together, they get an engine and they are off! The tower had retirees there who were more than happy to explain what was going on. Jim loved watching all the activity!

The world’s largest rail yard.

We spent 6 days in Stapleton, Nebraska and totally enjoyed our visit. The locals were friendly and we were very lucky to stay on the Opela’s ranch. But it was time to move on.

Thank you to the Opela family and the Bar 11 ranch!

At this point, we had been on the road three weeks. During that entire time, we had paid for a campsite only 3 nights. Not bad. That almost makes RVing affordable. Almost.

I have a post eclipse tidbit. If you were watching ABC News after the eclipse, you might have seen that they had a news crew reporting on the eclipse at a place called Car Henge. Link: https://youtu.be/HAlKNPur4UA

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Car Henge was on our path leaving Stapleton. Yup, we just had to stop! It was the day after the eclipse and the place still hadn’t recovered, people were everywhere. One of the local townspeople was trying to direct traffic in and out of the Car Henge parking lot. We opted to stop on the side of the road since the parking lot was WAY TOO SMALL for us. The gentleman was nice enough to park his town truck behind us with his flashing lights to give us some protection.  So we dashed in and got a few pictures.

Car Henge in all its glory.  Apparently, during a family reunion in the 1980’s (where alcohol was served), the family decided to “plant” old cars and arrange them exactly like Stonehenge.  This is the result.  They had no idea they were putting the town of Alliance, Nebraska on the map!

Car Henge.  I had another visitor remark to me, “Our country is crazy.”  In this case, I agree!

Car Henge had other “sculptures” too. The four in the background are called The Four Seasons.  On the left, the short green car represents wheat in the Spring, the two stacked yellow cars are the growing wheat in the summer.  The car to the right of that is the harvested wheat in the fall.  And the white car at an angle is winter.

And that concludes our eclipse coverage. It was totally worth driving all the way to Nebraska to see it. We would definitely do it again…and plan to. Nebraska has been a wonderful place to visit.