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camping, driving, Eclipse Trip, Fort Massac State Park, Mammoth Cave National Park, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 8 – The Long Trip Home)

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(Continued from Part 7)

Huzzah for rain!

So, we spent another full day at Fort Massac after the Eclipse, and it was the day that the rain finally came and the heat and humidity broke. Most of the people in the campground also left that morning, so it was a nice quiet day.

We got in some bike-riding and wandering once things cooled down. It did mean that more bugs came out, but we had local volunteers helping us with that.

Our son found a painted rock that someone had left on the (now vacant) site just north of ours. It was really cute, and was a fun find that made our day just that much brighter.

You rock!
Keep or Hide. (We left it there.)
Down at Fort Massac’s boat launch in the evening.

Of course, the sun coming out again after the rain was nice as well.  We made it down to the river again, and walked down to get some Ohio River mud on our shoes.

Nice dramatic clouds in the sunset too!

But as nice as it was to have the cooler weather, we set off the next day fairly early (and as we’d filled up just outside Paducah, we had a full tank to start with) because we were off to hit Mammoth Caves!

A Kentucky Police Pick-up Truck?

It was a wonderful day for a trip, being sunny with some light clouds, and cool enough that I didn’t have to really worry about the engine’s temperature, even though our trip was mostly uphill!  We did see some interesting stuff on our way, though, like the Police Pick-up Truck.  In Buffalo (and as much of New York law enforcement that I’ve seen) SUVs and vans are the only real non-sedan light vehicles, so this was an oddity worth a picture.

The TVA Paradise Fossil Power Plant.

The other was the cooling towers of the TVA Paradise Fossil Plant.  Some research after the fact shows that this coal-powered plant,  located just east of Drakesboro, has the largest megawatt capacity of any power plant in the state.  We could see the plumes of steam really clearly from the Western Kentucky Parkway.

We stayed on the Parkway until we got to US231, which we took until we got to KY70, which really got me a bit nervous at first.  I didn’t mind the hills or the curves, but rather the fact that there was really no shoulder to these roads.  Meeting any kind of large vehicle was a sort of test of nerves of jockeying between the ditch and clipping someone’s mirror.  But it was some lovely countryside when there wasn’t any oncoming traffic.

And driving on these smaller roads would end up being great experience for getting to our campsite later that night when it was getting dark.

But finally, we made it to Mammoth Cave National Park. (Which I’ll discuss in Part 9.)

 

 

 

camping, Dash Cam, Eclipse Trip, Fort Massac State Park, School Bus, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 7 – The Eclipse!)

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(Continued from Part 6)

This was a typical view of clouds on the 21st.

So, the morning of the 21st, we started getting stuff set up.  There was to be less than 20% cloud cover, a light breeze, and overall a good day for the Eclipse.  The cloud cover was in the form of mostly light cumulus clouds that were sliding from the south-south-west, but had big chunks of blue sky between them.

Our eclipse-viewing set-up.

We had brought a small 90mm refracting telescope that I fabricated a projection screen onto.  Using the 90 degree prism diagonal adapter, the image of the sun was easily visible on the small screen.  I had tested it in Buffalo on both the sun and the moon, so I was sure it would work well for all the lighting conditions of the eclipse, without a sun filter.  Well ahead of time, I took this out to the cleared space just south of our site and set it up.

The projection screen on the telescope, for those of us without the lovely steampunk goggles that allow you to look at the sun …
No, that’s not all dust on the lenses, those are sunspots!

I was really happily surprised that the screen worked as well as it did, as we were able to make out sunspots before the eclipse was even near approaching. I was able to leave the image up for a couple of minutes before the sun would track off and I’d have to readjust the telescope so the image would be visible, but that was no problem (except for a couple of times when a big cloud went over).

Here comes the moon …

Slowly, over the course of an hour, accompanied by drinks and popcorn, we watched the sun slowly disappearing as the moon slid in front of it.  Mostly we watched on the projection screen, but occasionally we’d sneak short looks with the solar glasses, to see it in  as unaided a manner as we could.

(Light) Clouds won’t stop us!

Even when the light clouds passed over, we were still able to see the progress, though the dense clouds were just too much.

Here’s the sun about half-way gone …

Slowly, but steadily, we watched the moon make it’s way across the sun’s face, and were able to look across the campground and watch people enter the park for the viewing they had set up at the visitor center/museum.  There were some people congregating at a campsite farther along our loop, but otherwise, we had the campground area to ourselves. (Which is really how we like it.)

And this is what a half-gone sun looks like without a telescope …

One of the things I was really surprised at was how bright it continued to be, even as the moon was covering up the sun.  It wasn’t until the very last 5-10% of the sun was getting covered that it made very much of a difference.

A tiny sliver of sun left …

But finally, the moment was upon us.  The ‘crescent sun’ kept getting smaller and smaller.

But still plenty of light for reading …

But there was still plenty of light for reading, even if it wasn’t full-strength sun.

But as the last little bits of sun were covered up, it got dramatically darker.

I had also turned the bus’ dashcam on.  Here’s the video of the eclipse from the bus’ point of view (sped up to double-speed).

The eclipsed sun as the camera saw it …

We did try to get a picture of the sun being eclipsed, but due to the humidity in the air, it wasn’t as dramatic as we’d hoped – the light was getting refracted back into the darkened area.  As such, instead of a nice dark area in sky, like we saw with our eyes, the camera picked up a dully glowing donut of sorts.

The crescent sun is on the other side now!

And then, the sun, slowly came back.  We had one diamond show up on the projection screen, but it was gone too fast to get a picture. And then it was like we were back to just standing in the sun, much as we had been waiting for the eclipse.

The sun is almost all the way back …

And slowly the sun came back and it was just like every afternoon we’d had up to that point.  But it was an amazing thing to witness, and surprising as to how long it actually took for the eclipse to be noticeable, and how quickly it returned to normal (at least to our unaided eyes).

(More of the trip in Part  8)

 

Bulliet (Stitzel-Weller) DIstillery, camping, Destination, driving, Eclipse Trip, Fort Massac State Park, school bus RV, Skoolie

Our Eclipse Trip (Part 4)

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(Continued from Part 3)

The Wanderlodge behind us.

Now full of pizza and wings, we set off to find our way out of Butchertown.  Along the way, we were followed (and passed) by a beautifully kept Wanderlodge.  These are the ‘official’ company made RVs built out of school bus bodies (from 1968-2009).

The Wanderlodge heads off to parts unknown while we turn left. We had way more windows, though …)

As the Wanderlodge headed off on it’s own adventure, we made our way back onto the highway and over to the Bulliet Distillery.  The distillery is the only one in a rather industrial area just outside the city (map here) limits of Louisville as it was secured before the area was developed because of the availability of good water (and also to avoid paying taxes).  As it was, there were plenty of trucks and parking lots for heavy vehicles along the way.

One of the newer storage buildings.

The distillery was originally the the Stitzel-Weller Distilling Company  which was founded in 1935 with the combination of the distributor W. L. Weller & Sons, and the A. Ph. Stitzel Distillery.  Known for their ‘Old Fitzgerald’, ‘W.L. Weller’, ‘Pappy Van Winkle’, and other brands through 1972, when the distillery closed though the storage buildings continued to age barrels (at the height of it’s operations, the storage buildings could house 800,000 cases worth of bourbon).

Our tour guide walking us through the distilling process on a display of the facilities.

Bulleit was started (again) in 1987, and used some of the facilities at the Sitzel-Weller plant (though production other that R&D was moved before our tour – be on the lookout for a chocolate rye to be coming out in a few years!).

In the cooperage.

One of the cool things on the tour was seeing one of the few remaining historic cooperage buildings still with gear in it.  It had the facilities to empty a leaking barrel, remove the ends and bands, and allow the staves to be splayed, replaced, or leaks packed with rushes (rushes impart no odd flavors, it turns out).

A quick lesson on repairing a leaking barrel.
Quality control is first!

The highlight of the tour was the tasting. We tasted not only the regular Bulliet, but the 10 year-old, the single barrel uncut, the Rye Whiskey, and

some of the historic blend that’s being made with some of the orphan barrels that were left over when Bulliet took the space over.

But alas, it was over all too soon.  Though we did still have a drive ahead of us, and one of the things that I never seem to be able to do is get to a campground while it’s still light.  So, off we set for Metropolis.

And wound up in a traffic jam.  There were two accidents within a mile of each other and the multiple lanes of traffic were just crawling.

Finally we were in the clear and moved easily down I-65, until we hit the interchange with the Western Kentucky Parkway, which becomes I-69 near Morton’s gap. The interchange had a 15-20 minute stop-and-go traffic jam because of the merging with the Elizabethtown exits, but before we could get to that we had to climb the hill.

And the boy got plenty of reading done …

But once we got onto the Parkway, the engine was nice and cool, and we sailed along.  The Parkway runs nearly straight west, but with lots of hills, though none big enough to slow us down to shift into fourth.

Finally, we hit the end of I-69 where it intersects with I-24, which we took toward Paducah.  We got glimpses of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, but it was starting to get toward evening and I had high hopes of getting to Fort Massac before dark. (I seem to have a hard time ending up at our campsite before dark for some reason.)

Looking west from the I-24 bridge over the Ohio River. Metropolis is just a few miles downriver.

But there was still some light as we got through Paducah and headed back across the Ohio River again and into Illinois.

Our exit was just past the bridge, and then it was only a couple of miles to our site.  Finally, we were at our location for the eclipse, safe, sound, and kind of tired!

 

(Continued in Part 5)