We did some riding before the eclipse, even as we kept checking the sky through our eclipse glasses and confirming the sun was still up there. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger even briefly put her eclipse glasses on while riding the Calypso ride, looking for the Sun, and discovered that was an efficient way to get motion sick.
About twenty minutes or so before totality we left the park, getting back to our car, to stow the souvenirs we'd gotten --- the store had this great little plush Iron Dragon, imitating the mascot of the roller coaster --- and to get out the camera tripod. bunnyhugger had been waiting for a chance to learn how to use this, and the time for that would have been more than twenty minutes before the eclipse. But a hard deadline does offer a certain clarity of focus as well. It was all tolerably familiar to the tripod I'd had in Singapore; I just needed a bit to remember how you extend the legs (there's latches that have to open up). Figuring out how to lock the angle of the tripod mount on top of the lens --- and the height of the mount above the base --- would wait until after totality, but that's all right. Her pictures, aided by a sheet of eclipse filter strapped to the barrel of her camera, came out good. Mine did not.
We set up our viewing stand just outside the park, although inside the X-ray station where the big metal tripod attracted less interest than bunnyhugger's camera did our first time in. There might have been a better viewing spot inside the park but we figured this was a good spot, none too busy and it's not like we wouldn't be able to hear the announcements, or wouldn't be able to tell when totality arrived. The DJ even announced that for totality they would be turning off the park's lights and going quiet. This was almost but not quite so; the sign above the front gate continued to proclaim the cosmic phenomenon throughout the park. (And I know what you're thinking: wouldn't it have been hilarious if they'd played the whole of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' for the duration of totality? Sorry, totality here lasted about three minutes 45 seconds or so, and the radio edit of the song is four and a half minutes. The album cut is seven minutes(!), which is an exceptional length for an eclipse.)
I know I had joked about the terror of having to go to the bathroom right at totality but there was a woman who ran into the bathroom with a minute or two to go. I have no idea if she got out in time.
And then came the countdown and just as predicted --- isn't that amazing? --- the reduced sun went from too bright to stare at to too absent not to stare at. It's hard to think of everything there is to do in such a strange circumstance. bunnyhugger took a few pictures before realizing she needed to take the eclipse filter off her camera. I tried looking around seeing the light and the fundamental strangeness. Not that the whole sky was dark, but that the zenith was dark while the horizon bright. Other things happened that stunned me by being just as predicted, such as birds coming in to roost the way they would at night. The seagulls, being the most populous bird around, made the biggest attraction out of this. They swept in from the shore, cawing and coming to roost just as they might at sunset, but faster.
I wrote this when I did my quick post, right after the eclipse, to capture my fresh thoughts but I was so amazed by how present the Moon looked in front of the Sun like that. They both looked like things, not just features, tangible in a way that the Moon only looks in a telescope and the Sun ... never looks. Or didn't look except for this.
The most amazing thing besides everything, though, is how long it felt like it took. Or how little time. It just --- look, three minutes 45 seconds is not long. You can spend that long doing something without remembering a second of it. But here, now ... even as the Moon and the Sun were racing in opposite directions ... it felt like there was nothing but time, as if it might go on forever like this.
It didn't. It wasn't even four minutes before a sparkle appeared at the bottom of the Moon and Sun, and then a little bit of totality ended and the day was back at once.
Enjoy some more of the Gilmore Car Museum, if that's not inconvenient for you.
Of course what would a car museum be without motorcycles? And what would a motorcycle exhibit be without one of the motorcycles actually ridden by Henry Winkler in Happy Days? I don't know whether the booth is a series prop or just something that looks diner enough.
And now here we have one of those adorable ridiculous cars you enter through the front hatch!
This was a part of the building that showed comically tiny cars mostly by Europeans. The Blanchina here was part of the ``Transformable Series 1'' which means it coincided with the Dinobots and Constructicons but predated the Insecticons or learning the secret of Omega Supreme.
And hey, it's one of those Crosley cars I was reading about a couple months ago. I didn't know they had moustaches!
Here fresh to us from 1980 is the Comuta-Car electric vehicle, and please hold your giggling. There'll be more pictures coming.
Now this here is the King Midget Model 2, one of many attempts to meet postwar consumer demand for cars by providing them with a thing smaller than most lawn mowers and lacking such frills and luxuries as speedometers and reverse gear. Still, it was only five hundred bucks so what else would you do with that much money, buy a G.I. Bill home?
Trivia: In 1727 the German mineralogist Franz Ernst Brückmann published a book about geology printed on asbestos paper. Source: Paper: Paging Through History, Mark Kurlansky. (Ray Bradbury Firefighter: [ growling ])
Currently Reading: Your Pinball Machine: How to Purchase, Adjust, Maintain, and Repair Your Own Machine, B B Kamoroff.
