The Quest . . . Caesar's Head

The quest is to find the perfect viewpoint in the path of totality for the solar eclipse on August 21st.

We are hearing that NC will have a lot of visitors, traffic jams and unless you can get to a remote area early in the day or night before, you may be stuck on a road and not get to see the total eclipse.

With having a dog that is almost 18 years old who cannot get up without help, we have a window of about four hours, otherwise, we would have camped out overnight at one of the premier mountain spots . . . but that is not to be.

Since parts of SC are in the path of totality, I thought we might have a better chance of finding "our spot" if we went an hour south.  Caesar's Head seemed like the perfect spot with 7 miles of switchbacks going up to get there.  No one will want to do that to see the eclipse, right?

The rangers we talked to warned us not to come, just on the amount of phone calls they are getting and with such a small, winding road covered in trees, if stuck in a line of traffic, we would surely miss the event. 

Then I was thinking that maybe the rangers just want that magnificent view all for themselves?!!!

Well, it was a beautiful day, the ride was easy and the weather was cool all the way up there.

Re-thinking this whole thing, and back to the drawing board.  

We got out our maps and this weekend are headed up back roads from our house to Cedar Mountain in NC.  Maybe this will be "our spot"!

Our time is running out.  We may just end up at the boathouse, which is going to have 99.6 totality, but we want that two full minutes of total darkness.

The girls at the post office are really into the eclipse and in between customers have been reading up on it.  They told me if I find a place to view the totality to look for what is called shadow snakes.  

Shadow snakes can appear right as the sun and moon reach totality and are very rare and unexplained. 

One way or another, we will be in the path of totality!

One plus is we are seeing a lot of our state parks in this quest.

There are so many so close surrounding us, we have years of exploring to do!

This is Bald Rock.

I can just picture viewing the eclipse right here!