Already last year, even before the annular solar eclipse happened in October, I was thinking through how we could make the total solar eclipse in 2024 special. Since it was happening in April, before Texas turns into a furnace, I thought camping would be an excellent plan.

Texas state park campsites can be reserved 5 months ahead of time, and so I had chosen a few parks that would be in the path of totality, and set a reminder a few days before 5 months ahead so I could scope out preferred locations within the parks and that sort of thing. They were all gone. Every one of them. I searched a bit for non state park campsites, but the price gouging was so stupid that I just didn’t have the heart to bother. Austin was in the path of totality, so we’d just watch it from our house.

Then in February, the pack leader for Ian’s cub scout troop, sent out information for a scout campout to which cub scout families were invited. Camping was for Saturday through Monday (the day of the big eclipse), and the intervening time would be chock full of scouting and eclipse-related activities. It was more than we had planned to spend, but it was just too good to pass up. Plus, Ian and that pack leader’s youngest son are very good friends, so he’d have someone to play with as well.

Sean rented a lens for his camera that would be good for eclipse photography. He purchased a solar filter for said lens so he could take photos of the partial eclipse as well. He made sure he had the right hardware so he could correctly mount the camera and lens to his tripod.

As the big day approached, we kept watching our forecast. We’d been enjoying so much clear and mild and sunny weather, it was disappointing that for a solid ten days our forecast ranged from cloudy to cloudy and rainy and back to cloudy again. Oh well, we were gonna go camping regardless, so we’d just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best.

The Smilin V Scout Ranch is only maybe 40-45 minutes away from us, but we were definitely out of town. Since we weren’t to be provided food on Saturday night, we chose to stop by Liberty Hill and eat a calm-before-the-storm dinner at Dahlia Cafe. We couldn’t have asked for better. It was only about 5:00 when we got there, so it wasn’t too full. The food was good – Sean and I had chicken fried steak (and theirs is a solid rendition), Maya had a cajun tilapia dish that she was very fond of, and Ian – believe it or not – took down nearly all of a 12-oz ribeye. They have pies by the slice or whole, but the kids scored big with a brownie for Ian and a blondie for Maya, both topped with generous scoops of ice cream.

Check in at camp was from 6-10p that evening, but when we rolled in around 6:30, things weren’t too busy, and we were saved a camp site so that Ian and his scout friend could be neighbors. Mostly, Sean and I set up our tent and things while Ian played with his friend and Maya caught crickets and grasshoppers. There was a big open area for the kids to run and play in and still be in eyesight of the grown ups, so the set-up was perfect for us.

After our camp prep was finished, we took a stroll around the grounds to walk off dinner and orient ourselves a bit. We located the bathrooms and the main pavilion where food would be served on Sunday and Monday and where some of the activities took place. We wandered by the scout store and bought capitol area council eclipse patches for the kids.

It was a windy night, and our very boxy tent did a fair amount of dancing in the breeze. Other than the noise, I don’t think the kids were all that bothered about it, but Sean and I were both relieved when it had made it through the night.

Sean and I were already awake, but at 7:00, we were treated to the sounds of a bugler bugling to get everyone up and moving in time for breakfast at 7:30. The first round of scouting activities commenced at 8:30, and it was not limited only to scouts. Maya could participate too. Heck, even Sean and I could if we wanted to. Maya wanted some down time, so Sean went with Ian to go through an orienteering course.

Maya and I met up with them when they were going to build lego cars to run down the track, pinewood derby style. I had a lot of fun examining the animals they had on hand. They had a variety of central Texas toads, frogs, and lizards. There were turtles and tortoises. We even got to check out a couple of snakes. They had a ball python, which everyone got to hold. And they had a lovely rat snake who maybe wasn’t “tame” enough to be handled safely.

After that, we all trundled up to the shooting range where Ian and Maya tried out both archery (which Ian has had a fair amount of practice in, though not outdoors and in the wind) and “wrist rockets” which are sling shots. With those, they shot dried chickpeas at a row of foil pie-plates clipped to a string. Those things are hard to aim on a good day, but doubly so, I’d imagine, when your target is waggling around in the breeze.

After lunch, we walked to a different area to look at a couple different solar telescopes and do some eclipse and eclipse-adjacent crafts. The kids made coronas (like they’d see when the sun was behind the moon if it weren’t too cloudy) using black paper and chalk. They punched out pictures and words in thick paper so they could use those to let the sun shine through and make little eclipse shapes, like we did with the colander last fall (again, if it’s not too cloudy). And they used LEDs and batteries to make red light flashlights that they could use during this evening’s star party (if skies were clear).

Right then, the sky was clear enough to check out the solar telescopes. Yes, plural. Here’s the episode where I learned there are multiple ways of observing the sun through a telescope. Evidently, in the past, I’ve only looked at it through a white light filter. This allows you to see the sun spots, which in itself is interesting. But, with a hydrogen-alpha solar telescope, the filter only allows a narrow frequency of light through toward the red end of the spectrum, and this is the frequency at which the sun shows much of its activity. Looking through the hydrogen-alpha telescope, we were able to see the prominences exploding up from the sun’s surface. Many of these arc right back to the sun’s surface, and we were able to observe that as well around the sun’s edge. In the body of the sun, we saw a dark line that represented a prominence as well. It was our first time seeing that, and it was amazing.

The kids were getting antsy by this point, so we moseyed back toward our camping spot for a little breather before the kids went and did more activities. They worked at a water flow exhibit a bit, but rather than listening to the well-intentioned leader teach them about waterway maintenance, they just wanted to obstruct water flow and play in the water. By this point, it was getting pretty hot, so I’m not too surprised. Ian spent a very long time chatting with a fellow about the finer points of coin collecting. In fact, he went back and visited that man at least one more time and walked away with a magazine on the topic.

Maya needed some downtime, so I sat with her for a while at our very hot, sunshine-filled camp site so she could read about birds and not be bothered by nine year old boys or adults who insisted she follow directions.

We went back to find both the boys embroiled in, of all things, chess games! We rounded them up and headed back to the main pavilion to hear a talk from Colonel Mike Fossum, former Eagle Scout and astronaut. He had spent time on the international space station and came to chat with the kids about scouting and about outer space.

Col. Fossum made it through his whole talk and nearly the entire Q&A afterward before one brave kid finally asked the question they’d all been wanting to know. How do you go to the bathroom when there’s no gravity?! I suspect he’s had to field this one before because he had a carefully delivered explanation peppered with just the right amount of humor. There’s a suction system for the urine so it can be recycled. “Yesterday’s coffee is today’s coffee!” he quipped. On space walks they wear a MAG or maximum absorbency garment, “because calling it a diaper just wouldn’t be cool!” he grinned.

The kids had all been given nice photos of him at check in, and he spent a very long while, probably literal hours over the course of a couple days, talking with the individual kids and signing their photos for them.

After dinner that evening, we hung out a while and listened to a live band playing “the classics” which apparently now includes things like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” I don’t recall getting old, but apparently I’m there. The kids were bored and went and played while the grown ups sat in the shade and relaxed. A nice cold beer right about then would have been delightful, but that understandably doesn’t jive with a scout camp, so we made the most of water from a nearby spigot and cans of cold soda purchased from the scout store.

Maya abhors the smell and taste of grilled food, so we had brought along a couple of dehydrated meals just in case. While she liked that evening’s dinner (after hounding the nice volunteer serving the food about how it had been prepared), we had promised her one of the meals, so Sean made it for her. And to her credit, she ate her second dinner as well.

We didn’t have too much time after that before we headed to the big event of the evening – the star party. We used red light or no light at all in walking to the star party location. (I learned more new things.) I had thought that you didn’t use white light because it causes the pupil to retract and it takes a bit for it to re-adapt to dark conditions. But there’s more to it than that. Evidently, after your pupils dilate to let more light in, then the rod and cone cells in your retina produce a pigment (rhodopsin) that increases our eyes’ sensitivity. If that is damaged by white light, it can take as long as 40 minutes to reset. This pigment isn’t damaged by red light.

Ian’s pack leader is an enthusiastic amateur astronomer. Presumably because he’s not doing this every day like it’s his job, he has fun with it. To paraphrase … Here’s a constellation. Here’s its story. Where I grew up the sky was different. The spring sky is different from the summer sky. And on and on.

Early in the evening, before it dropped too low in the sky to avoid interference from our atmosphere, we were able to check out Jupiter and three of its moons with a telescope. We learned to spot satellites as they zinged through the sky. And we saw so many constellations, more and more as the clouds drifted away and the sky continued to darken. Here are some that I remember: Big Dipper, Little Dipper (faintly), Orion, Perseus holding Medusa’s severed head, Leo, Gemini (or separately Castor and Pollux), Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Taurus, Canis Major, Canis Minor, the Pleiades (or the seven sisters), and more that I simply cannot recall. I would have stayed longer, but Maya was telling me her legs hurt and not telling me that she was cold out there in her shorts and short sleeves. Despite having left early, the experience had been a hit for me. It was a beautiful night to look at the sky.

We went to bed that evening under clear skies and cold, crisp, quiet air. In the middle of the night at some point, the wind abruptly picked up and by morning, we emerged into a thick, moist morning under heavy cloud cover. It was a long while till the eclipse was happening, but given that rain showers were slated to come through in the afternoon, none of us were too optimistic about the cloud cover diminishing.

There were activities happening again on this last day in camp, but most of us were a bit tired from the past couple days and maybe a little mopey about the weather on top of it. We mostly just let the kids run free and play while we worked at dismantling our campsite and packing up the car, just in case that rain came earlier than expected.

The eclipse would start at 12:17p, so shortly after lunch, volunteers distributed eclipse glasses to all attendees. We thought the crowd would really swell on Monday, because folks had the option to just come for the day instead of camping all weekend. And while it’s true that more people arrived, it never felt crowded.

We did get some intermittent breaks in the cloud cover to observe the moon slowly creeping in on the sun. Sean had set up his camera and was capturing a few cool images. Much more of the sun had to be covered than I’d have expected before we really even noticed how dark it was getting. We were delighted to see a good big patch of blue stretching out in front of us, and for a little while we could see the crescent of the sun shrinking ever smaller. But things were moving too quickly, and with maybe 15 or 20 minutes till totality a thick bank of clouds rolled through.

Sean said he thought he saw a clear patch, but I couldn’t discern what he meant and thought maybe he was just giving me a little hope. But I had none. I slumped in my lawn chair and tried to be happy with the things we did get to see. The mood trickling through the crowd was ripe with disappointment. And then, it felt like just moments before totality, we got little flickers of fingernail sun through the clouds. Yells of “I SEE IT” rolled through a crowd consisting significantly of too-cool-for-school teen and preteen boys.

And suddenly we saw the sun slip away. First we saw Baily’s Beads, then a diamond ring, and then a dark circle in the sky surrounded by a shimmering corona. The clouds obscured our view from time to time, but it was incredible nonetheless. I don’t think photos can adequately prepare you for what you see, nor do I think they can reflect what it was like to be there in that moment seeing the world go briefly dark with only a halo of sun to provide light. And then, like a weird 360-degree sunrise, it was over. I don’t recall seeing Baily’s Beads on the way out of totality, but we got a cloudy diamond ring again. Not very much of the sun had to be uncovered before it was back to feeling like daytime again. A friend had said earlier, whether we see totality or not, there will be tears, and she was correct.

The moment totality was over, the kids were ready to hit the road. The poor darlings had been deprived of their screens since Saturday morning, after all. But the clouds had somewhat dissipated, so we hung out for a while taking a few more photos of the partial eclipse. We had observed bright red briefly in the corona during totality, and I thought my eyes were tricking me, but in Sean’s photos and in the solar telescope, we saw prominences around the edge of the sun that mirrored those red bits. This time too, you could see the arch of the more distinct prominence very clearly. We were told that that prominence might be ten Earths tall.

Eventually we finished packing up and headed home. Traffic was a bit thicker, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. The theory is that maybe since the forecast for eclipse viewing was so terrible, many folks either didn’t bother or went elsewhere. At any rate, I think we were home by around four o’clock, unloading our car and trying to set things back in order.

Sean’s parents were in Arkansas for the eclipse and got a good clear view during totality. My parents in Missouri had clear skies and a good long time to watch as well. We had kept the kids out of school so we could watch together as a family, and we were pleased to find that there had been a break in the clouds and everyone at the kids’ school got to experience totality as well. Talk about a shared experience! We had nearly zero cell reception at the camp ground, so it was funny to see all the different texts from friends and family once we re-entered cell coverage.

Now that I’ve seen it once, I want to experience it again. I’m sure that zeal will diminish over time. After all, there are plenty of experiences with which to fill one’s time. But until then … Europe in 2026? Maybe Australia in 2028?