Addison area of Dallas was clear skies until about 30 minutes before totality. Mostly cloudy after that, but enough breaks that we probably saw close to half of the 3.5 minutes of totality/ring of fire. Headed to the airport about a half hour after, no traffic at all until we got to the DFW rental car return ramp.

(Crazy lines for the rental shuttle for anyone trying to get to A,B,C terminals, and the E precheck line was almost 20 minutes, but we're home now.)

We had a lot of clouds in Austin but we got enough of a gap to see totality with the naked eye.

https://x.com/ATXJetsetter/status/1777408546956509376

I had absolutely no problem arriving to and departing from the total solar eclipse.

Traffic was no worse than usual. That is a first for me.

Traffic in Waco also seemed easy. Our hotel was near a body of water and sparse so we didn’t feel the need to drive anywhere. I have some friends in Dallas & Austin who mostly had few cloud issues. Definitely good to fly out here for this. Now it’s ultra stormy so the drive / flight with dfw tonight can be a challenge. We booked dfw because it was cheaper than aus.

I've only been to Waco (other than passing through or stopping for gas) once, and was surprised how nice it is. They have cleaned up the riverfront and there are restaurants, hotels, and other shops very close.

we went to the Dr Pepper museum after luncheon at Magnolia - wow.

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.

So glad that the clouds parted for our many FTers in TX. Our friends down at Camp Wood didn't get an awesome view, but they were mostly happy. And we don't second guess heading out to cut the risk of not seeing it (we went to Canada, leaving TX on Sunday morning)... where we encountered groups who'd driven hours to escape clouds in NY (a friend who stuck it out in the ROC area saw zip but cloud cover for the entire eclipse).


Similar for us; we flew to BTV, hung out Sunday afternoon, then drove to YUL to stay with friends there (as there was zero chance we were going to pay $1k+ for a single night of hotel in BTV or nearby). After that, we drove east, intending to get to Sherbrooke or somewhere near it, but traffic was awful. We bailed out in Granby, Quebec, and sought out a big box store parking lot. A group with a professional astronomer and a ton of gear saw us setting up and pulled in next to us (same deal on their plans), and we had a great time.

But that drive back... ugh. Sounds like you were in the same traffic we were. The border crossing took ~2 hours (really, CBP?) and was backed up miles. Then there was a broken down semi on I-91 (~1 hour delay). Then... I had forgotten that Franconia Gap on I-93 narrowed down to 1 lane each way. That was on me, as I'd have stayed on I-91 or I-89 and ignored GPS had I remembered that fact from prior trips down that stretch. Google, lacking accurate traffic data due to spotty cell coverage, kept routing everyone off of I-93 onto NH back roads, which was a horrible mistake. We started ignoring it after the first 2 hour diversion that was only supposed to be a "7 minute delay" vice "37 minutes" on I-93. At one point, right outside the Franconia Gap, Google actually told us to get off onto NH 18, use it to essentially make a U-turn (transferring onto I-93 northbound), then backtrack, get off onto NH 116 (which we'd already sat on for 2 hours), and follow it eventually to NH 18... where it would merge back onto I-93 literally at the exact interchange it wanted us to exit from I-93 south! That would have been a 3+ hour freaking loop that bought us nothing at all but more frustration.

What should have been a 4.5 hour drive to BOS from Granby turned into 12.5 hours. Once we cleared the Franconia Gap, it was smooth sailing at 80mph all the way to Logan, though thank goodness for speed trap alerts (there were tons). We made it to BOS at 4:45am for our 5:45am departure, driving all night, and as far as I know, there's still people stuck on the backroads of NH 116 and 414 and whatever other barely-paved routes Google and Apple were sending people.

Sorry to divert from TX eclipse viewing with that mini rant... kind of glad to hear from someone else who got stuck in the cluster that is NH DOT's management of their highways.

It was a tough call for sure -- I had refundable same-day flights to/from DFW for my son and I. It came down to deciding whether I'd feel more foolish spending a whole day and <more than I'd usually consider> just to go sit in a cloudy soup, and possibly getting stuck in the rain/thunderstorms/hail that were being predicted, or if I'd feel more foolish if I canceled and it turned out halfway decent. With no guarantee that any attempt to see a future one would go better. If we'd seen one before it would probably have tipped the other way, but we decided to go, and are very very glad we did. Ended up watching from the Dallas College North Lake campus in Irving. The view of the sun was mostly clear throughout; a few brief cloud interruptions during partial, and a full view of totality. There were some high level clouds that show up more in pictures than in real life, but they didn't really detract IMO.

Traffic didn't look too bad in the DFW area when I looked out of curiousity. I suspect a lot of people changed their destination, and a lot in the area stayed home. For us, no wait for DART in either direction. TSA pre-check had a line and took ~15 minutes, but I was prepared for much worse.

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.

For the beer drinkers here, Austin Beerworks, Meanwhile Brewing, and Zilker Brewing came up with a beer commemorating the eclipse. I saw it at the store tonight and it's actually pretty good.

Lol I've been annoyed for a few days but okay now. Congrats to everyone who gambled and won. Luxor on 8/2/27 here I come!

Hope nobody here was/is trying to fly Southwest out of AUS, seems they are having/had a meltdown over the last 2 days with 3+ hour long bag drop lines stretching down the airport access road

Most of the places we got eclipse beers from (including Meanwhile, which we got in a crowler since they weren't doing the actual can art until Monday, along with Four Quarters and Foam in VT) made IPAs. The eclipse Zilker we picked up was a Mexican lager.

No one seemed to think doing stouts was the right call for an eclipse? I saw Great Lakes was advertising a stout, but it was one of their regular lineup and not a special edition beer.

I had no idea that each brewery did their own as well. I assumed that this collaboration was the only one from them