I distinctly remember the video my family shared from when they went to see a total solar eclipse in the US (Yellowstone I think it was). My brother Matt exclaiming something like “that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen”. So, I was very motivated to get to the path of totality.
We went to the coast of Spain and we were rewarded with perfectly clear skies. There were a lot of people there. If you’ve wanted to eat at a restaurant you’d have had to book about 4 months in advance, but, it actually all went really well. We were able to get parking, there was plenty of space to see the eclipse.
It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I was expecting it to go completely dark (i.e. as dark as the middle of the night dark), but, it was more like a sunset all round. We had about 90 seconds of “totality” which is when you can look directly at the sun (no glasses required). During that time you can see the corona around the sun (the “crinkly bits”) and the photos just do not do it justice. It’s extremely beautiful and awesome (properly awesome). Here, watch this and you’ll get a sense of the real use of the word awesome.
There’s a total solar eclipse passing through NZ in 2028 and I’m extremely excited for that one (also going directly through Sydney which is crazy).
After the GOTC we headed to Spain – to the Galician Coast with just my immediate family (mum, dad, siblings, grandkids). We booked out a massive AirBnB for the 16 of us.
The reason we chose Galicia (and indeed the timing of the GOTC the previous week) was because of the total solar eclipse happening on August 12th!. I’ve spent very little time in Spain, probably the last time I was there was rock-climbing back in the day.
One of the highlights was the town of Lugo which is the only town with still intact Roman walls (3rd Century). You can walk the 2km circuit and get a nice view of the place, and it’s just pretty cool to be up there knowing that they’ve been around quite that long.
The place we were staying had a 15m pool which was extremely welcome! Europe is going through a heatwave (new normal?) and being able to just jump in the pool to cool off was bliss.
This is honestly one of my favourite events at the moment. Every 4 years my extended family comes together. Any descendant of my great grandmother comes together every 4 years. My great grandmother was called Danny because dad (the eldest grandchild) wasn’t able to make a “Gr” sound)! My siblings and I were running the event this time. We decided to re-run it (after consulting) at the same place we had the previous one – Kelling Heath. It’s a nice campsite/cabin place in Norfolk and it’s easy enough for the UK based family to get to. It’s a dark sky area, there’s a pool, plenty of space, and we can hire out most of the cabins about a year in advance so we’re all clustered in the same spot.
It’s an absolute dream for Anna as she has a dearth of cousins in NZ, and there are cousins everywhere you look while at the GOTC. I had “fun” putting a website together for the event. I was absolutely determined to put as little effort in as possible (mainly so there’d be no maintenance burden). I started off with Google Forms, then we decided we’d want to be able to display it on a site, so investigated extracting the content and parsing it etc. etc, eventually moving to firebase. Anyway, it was getting more and more and more complicated (I’ve been accused before of being a rube goldburg programmer ;, so I decided to throw it all away and just build one from scratch in my regular programming language. Having to think about features like “no logins” and “85 year olds using it” etc. gave some interesting constraints. Still, I’m happy enough with how it turned out and it’ll be easy to re-use for following events.
There were over 100 of us altogether! Over 100!! amazing. And we really all just get on well. Pimms was drunk, bike rides went on, games were played, laughs were had – and the time flew by. We also put on a “show” at the end, and the kids (and adults) had a lot of fun with that. Rob – one of the in-laws was a great addition to the group, as he’s great on guitar and really helped keep everything on the track!
When I was young, dad read me swallows and amazons which is a lovely book about a bunch of kids having adventures in the lake district of the UK. It’s set in the 1930s I guess but it’s pretty progressive for its time. One of the characters is Nancy Blackett who’s the pirate captain of the Amazons. The author (Authur Ransome) named his own boat the Nancy Blackett. Anyway, I’ve been reading the books to Anna, and there are a bunch of nautical terms (like halyards, mainstays, painters etc. etc.) and I was searching for a video to explain the terminology. It turned up this beautiful video ->
Now, I had no idea where Pin Mill was (where the boat is moored), but, turned out it was just a few hours away from where we were going to have our family gathering, so, we went for a sail. It was wonderful to be present on the authors boat. The boat itself features in the book we didn’t mean to go to sea. I tried reading that one to Anna, but, it was just a little bit too nautical so we skipped over it. Maybe we’ll come back to it some day.
Whipsnade Zoo is located outside of London and is a massive outdoor zoo run by the Zoological Society of London for conservation purposes. We had a lovely day wandering about and seeing the various animals. I had two favourite parts – the butterfly room (amazing) and the bird show (and environmental messaging) was also excellent.
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