Back in 2017, I was up some random fire-road in northern Georgia, about a half-mile from the centerline of the much-touted "Great American Eclipse" as we first came to know it.  While it wasn't the most ideal spot, the experience was interesting and fun, at least until it was time to drive out of the area -- when everyone along the totality path learned that when thousands of people try to drive away from a massive gathering at once, the results on the highways aren't pretty.  So I had firsthand experience with many nuances of that event, and had a pretty good idea how to plan for another one.  Some folks had started planning over a year in advance, but as we got into early 2024, the public hype and attention really started ramping up.

Accurate prediction of eclipses has been an established science for years, and even before computer modeling people were using long tables of numbers and dates and even elaborate charts like the Saros-Inex.  In this we can clearly see a certain regularity of pattern.

    [Images generally link to higher-resolution versions]

I became increasingly convinced that I simply had to get there.  Because as many experienced eclipse-watchers say, "99.5% is absolutely not 100%", aptly visualized here.

Let's just say we are *so* privileged to have all these tools available now. Electric roadtrips involve a lot more planning with online resources than in the old days, when we could just grab our *paper maps* and go.  But in a way, planning each leg of the trip and knowing exactly where I'm going to find the next charger is in some way a little more relaxing than white-knuckling along the interstate with the needle near "E" and wondering where the next gas station is.  The only "anxiety" in 2024 is availability of the chargers, i.e. whether they're actually working or not and how many other people might be lined up for an often scarce resource.

As the time drew nearer, it was time to start tracking the weather.  Two or three days out from the event, a monster late-winter storm was about to hit the entire Northeast with a lot of snow and rain.  On one hand this was good, as it seemed more likely that we would have gotten bad weather "out of the system" at the right time; on the other hand, it meant that things around northern VT were more likely to be snowed in, not plowed yet, and possibly less than easily passable to car traffic.

Things might have gotten a bit crowded here and there in 2017, but it never became all that unmanageable.  Some folks love to speculate the worst.  But the hype engine was using the lessons from 2017 to whip up even more of a frenzy about this one.  It didn't necessarily help that Boston-area press had pointed to Vermont as the best option for people wanting to travel into totality.  As I interacted more with the folks on that Reddit and a more general eclipse-oriented one, I absorbed a lot of perspective on how different people were thinking about the whole event.  Still, I decided that I would rig the sleeper berth in full winter mode like for the usual Florida runs, pack a bunch of food and water, and stay as independent and mobile as possible.  I, along with everyone else, had almost no idea what to expect.  Conventional wisdom held that many people would be traveling to their chosen spots a full day before the eclipse, because they'd already booked accomodations covering multiple days -- in fact many were forced to, as lodging was commonly being offered in minimum whole-weekend blocks plus the Monday.  For upwards of a thousand dollars a night!  Some establishments saw the whole thing as an opportunity to gouge.

I packed on the Saturday evening, and took off at a ridiculous 4AM on Sunday.  Again, I had no idea what to expect but wanted to get out ahead of any adverse possibilities.  I could stop just about anywhere and sleep later if I had to; the entire process of the trip was left completely open and adaptable.

I briefly stopped at the the Volta installation in Tilton, to see if there had been any improvements to the billing mechanisms on that set of chargers.  There hadn't.  They have typical debit/credit/RFID reader modules on the front, but have not been enabled to accept any forms of payment.  I made a brief call to the support number and railed at them about when the HELL were they going to fix this situation, as that location is still one of the farthest-north CCS sites before the White Mountains.  How any of these charging networks could refuse obvious ways to expand their customer base, is utterly baffling.

I reached Lincoln and the Franconia area around daybreak, and over the Franconia notch where the road goes to one lane each way was about the only place I found any snow on the road.  Whatever had resulted from the storm had been taken care of already, at least on the interstates.  My first charging stop was something of an experiment just to go see another location I'd spotted in Plugshare, a single EVConnect on the side of a Chevy dealership.  Nobody around that early in the morning, and my existing RFID card handily started it up.

No matter at the time, though; I would get the rest of my charge farther on in St. Johnsbury, or if that didn't work out I had some route alternatives laid out that would bring me to more chargers.  First, just on a lark, I went up to the Blink at the north end of town, to give it an honest go to see if they had actually developed enough clue to install something functional.  I used to be a Blink customer, but later left out of sheer disgust with how they were running their meager network.  Since they seemed to have a few more CCS locations by now, I figured I would give it a chance to simply accept a generic card like many of the other networks do.

So a short hop back down to the Ford dealership, and there was a pair of perfectly usable Chargepoints, not blocked in, and nobody else around.  It was still pretty early in the morning on a Sunday, so I didn't expect to see anyone else around the place.

This charge finished without incident, and I continued north toward Newport, which I knew would be a popular "city" destination for many other people as an alternative to, say, Burlington.  Traffic had been unexpectedly light this whole way up -- I practically had I-93 all to myself all morning, and by the time I was tooling west through Derby, I was only seeing a little local activity.  So much for my early fears of a massive one-day-out influx.

I only half lied about St. J being the last opportunity to fast-charge -- well, it was true for me, but in theory a Blink customer could use these installed at a "Jolley" gas station along US 5.  But even here, only one of the two units had power, and the people inside the store knew absolutely nothing about them other than one had never really been powered up and commissioned.

I continued down the road and swung into the Walmart, that's technically in Derby and not Newport, and discovered something interesting.  The store and parking lot are up on a piece of decently high ground, and the western edge of the lot looks out on a good long view westward where I could just make out Jay Peak.  But mostly I wanted to get the lay of the land here, as this Walmart was high on the list of places to potentially boondock for the overnight.

• At decent elevation even if not a peak
• Away from populated areas
• A parking area, in this case a trailhead for the Long Trail
• A power-line cut a short distance up a fire road, with a good westward view
• Did not involve any dirt roads to reach

In short, some approximation of perfect for my purpose. 

  ...   Or was it?

So I had arrived well within the totality band and the day was young yet, and now it was time to go exploring!  I tooled through downtown Newport, with a couple of stops to look at the lake and the pair of Chargepoint level 2s in a bank parking lot, and then headed out of town to do a big loop to check out the other map features I had noted in my studies.  I would go out as far as Richford, a town *right* on the eclipse centerline which could be another viewing site if the locals were friendly, and then hook back via Jay Pass to check it out.

Even though Vermont is a small state, distances up in these rural areas feel longer and more spread-out than they look on a map.  Jay Peak loomed over healthy sections of roadway as I approached, and on closer inspection was clearly still in busy ski season.  On the aerial imagery I had noticed various pull-offs around this area I could earmark as more potential boondock sites, but I quickly found that all of those were still snowed in, so it was clearly going to be someplace paved and plowed for the overnight whenever that would happen.

I swung through the Jay Peak resort complex, looking for a rumored pair of level2 chargers someplace on the campus, but couldn't find them.  The main parking lot was packed, busy with people obviously there to ski and shred, and of course muddy, so I didn't stick around there long but kept going south.  The next surprise was the the Jay Peak trailhead parking, which was almost full!  Long Trail closed my ass, there were clearly lots of people out romping in the snowy woods.

Richford is a charming little town, and I didn't see any obvious indication that it was gearing up for eclipse traffic -- despite being *on* the track centerline.  I stopped in a small general store and got more coffee, and asked the locals if they were "prepared for the onslaught".  They were actually pretty excited about the prospect of having a big batch of day visitors, and didn't seem worried about it being a big shit-show of traffic and people vying for parking.  The local fire department was taking up a collection along the main street, and as I dropped a few coins in the proffered boot I asked the same question; from a responder standpoint they seemed completely calm about was theoretically about to hit them.

It was almost surreal to finally reach this spot, which looked almost the same as it had in street-view except now with snow.  But it had been plowed, so I wouldn't have to shovel my way in!  I was almost surprised to find another car here, given that I had been almost alone on the highways leading up to here -- my original paranoid hype-influenced concept of busy "day-before" traffic was completely wrong, the entire area seemed to be in a typical quiet rural Sunday afternoon instead.

I walked up the road beyond the gate, first to track up the completely virgin snow covering it.  The day was quite warm, close to 50F, and of course I was barefoot, enjoying some "snowfooting" which has become my favorite winter sport.  On reaching the power-line, I was greeted by a satisfying long view to the west, even if only a segment of the total vista from here, but still likely all the way out to Lake Champlain and beyond.

With the afternoon wearing on and far less traffic already on the roads than I had feared, it seemed likely that I didn't need to be so close to here for an overnight.  Besides, I wanted to get a reasonably full charge before tackling the next day, so I'd have plenty of reserve for more driving around in the process of getting back up here.  As the only options in the area by now were slow level-2 chargers, I expected to sit at one for several hours before deciding where to sleep.  I headed back into town, passed briefly by the chargers at the bank lot and found both of them occupied, and headed up out of town to an alternate location I'd waypointed at a Vermont Electric office.  It was clearly closed on this Sunday afternoon and there wasn't much else around the area, but the chargers were available and cell service was usable, so I plugged in and prepared to hang out here for a while.

While biding time at the co-op office that afternoon I caught a brief nap as well, and sometime later a woman emerged from the office and left in the other car that was parked near the door, leaving me completely alone in the lot other than a couple of service trucks.  I guess she was spending part of her weekend catching up on work.  As dusk eventually arrived, my charge was just about done.  Since things had been so quiet and undisturbed here all along here, I decided to simply move over a few spaces, toward the black pickup that still had snow on its hood and had clearly not moved in days, and overnight right here rather than go back down to the Walmart or anywhere else.

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-->   Continue to Part 2:   eclipse day!