Originally Posted by
STS-134
I escaped DFW and went to BOS, then drove to Newport, VT. NWS was saying that east of the Green Mountains would be mostly clear while places west would have viewing obstructed by high clouds. Saw totality near the lake. Traffic was awful though, similar to Chile in 2019. The federal government should revoke funding for I-93 given that I-93 has a section where there's only 1 lane in each direction (a violation of Interstate highway standards) and this caused a massive traffic jam. I waited for 5 hours in Newport for the traffic to clear and left at 8:30 pm but still didn't get back to Manchester, NH until 1:30 am. That time, I specifically avoided I-93 due to the one lane segment but there were jams all the way down I-91 and I-89, including some stop and go traffic after 1 am.
My family canceled IAH flights/car and AUS hotel and paid the difference for BOS, and also drove up I-93 a few miles into QC, and came back across Derby Line, VT by 4:30 pm. Data jam as expected, we went down to St. Johnsbury and split off to I-93 by 7 pm, then the nightmare began.
Franconia ran out of gas, and had traffic jams all around town. NHDOT closed both Franconia exits, and trapped us on I-93 for hours, moving at below 1 mph. Countless people walked into the roadside darkness due to bladder pressure, but if their car continued moving and they lost sight of their driver, they'd have no way to make a call! We couldn't exit into Franconia to make a u-turn to go back north! Having been trapped from 7:30 pm to midnight moving barely 3 miles, we made an "unauthorized" u-turn across the police/tow truck turnaround spot (amazingly nobody did) and covered our last 4 hours in 4 minutes! Onto Littleton's 24-hour gas station's bathroom, we went over to I-91 to Lebanon, I-89 to Concord and back to I-93, and reached Bedford, MA at 4 am. Had we stayed on I-93, it would've been another 2-3 hours, as we saw on Google Maps the red section slowly shifted southward and finally went orange at 4 am.
NHDOT telling people to stay on I-93 was simply creating potential emergencies--medical, fuel, mechanical, etc. By 8-9 pm we figured the post-eclipse mobile data jam was over everywhere, and the thousands of cars in Franconia had no or spotty or unusable data and phone ability was just because of overcrowding. This was dangerous.