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Austin, TX 102.2 mi (164.5 km) |
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I’m back in the heart of Texas, everyone!
And boy what a wild adventure it’s been already! My friends from the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse have made plans to see the next one here in Austin, and boy, what a thought to realize that was already seven years ago! Unlike that last smooth landing in Cody, Wyoming, our arrival in Austin came with a major snag! When our friend, Kat, called the rental home we’d booked to see if we could check in early, they told us they gave our reservation to someone else, because they claimed they never got paid! We’d landed in the middle of a big city assembling for a major cosmic event with nowhere to stay!
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We hung around a park near the original house while Kat stayed on the phone with them! They tried to put the five of us in a hotel room. No way! They tried to refund us and leave us high and dry! No how! I didn’t have Kat’s patience and determination, so I went wandering through the wildflowers, which were lovely, and talked the ear off a resident armadillo, who’d no idea there was an eclipse coming and had never heard of customer service! After a while, he just rolled into a ball, and after three hours, I followed suit.
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Then boom! After four hours (four hours) on the phone with customer service, they had a new house for us! All Kat had to do was invoice them for the extra thousand bucks to get it refunded. What a mess! The new house was way up in Round Rock, over twenty miles north of where we planned to spend our long weekend, but it was a place to stay with even more rooms and beds than the last place!
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But don’t get me wrong; it was a quirky place! Not only was my room full of crickets, but the house itself was right next to a power plant, which had one of its trucks permanently parked on the front lawn!
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No matter! We were here to have fun, and I had so many friends in town for this eclipse! I even met up with Penguin, Jr. and Penguin III, who told me over tacos that they were here to investigate a great dimensional rift about to open up over Austin! If they didn’t stop it, it could release their great foe, Ernest Shackleton, back onto the Earth once again, spreading terror upon all Penguin Kind! In fact, they said they needed my help to repair the rift before it was too late! My help? As if I’d ever done such a thing before! After all, they were the ones who could teleport through home appliances. Oh boy, I told them I would try.
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The Penguins were absolutely convinced that the rift would open up directly over the city of Austin, so we had to find a good place to map it out. That led us to Zilker Park, considered the “jewel in the heart of Austin” for its city views. Part of the park was the Zilker Botanical Gardens, which rose up onto a hill and surely must have had the most spectacular view!
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Sure enough, there was one fine view of the city from the Taniguchi Japanese Garden, founded by Isamu Taniguchi, who’d been a farmer in California but moved here after three and a half years in an internment camp! Many years later, he retired in Austin with his family and spent 18 months designing and hand-building this garden as his gift to the city!
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All throughout the garden were waterfalls and koi ponds galore! To me, it was super beautiful and peaceful, with waterfalls designed to showcase 100 varieties of native plants, but to the Penguins, it was drawing them further away from their mission. Each time I reassured them that the upcoming eclipse was just the moon passing in front of the sun, and that they happened pretty regularly without releasing any undead explorers, they changed the subject to whether I thought duct tape was very effective at patching dimensional rifts!
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But we stopped by an Insect Hotel to ask around, first to see if they could spare any chicken wire, second to recruit a swarm that could lift two penguins up to a dimensional rift long enough to install it! Only, this hotel is mostly designed for solitary bees and wasps, and they didn’t know how to cooperate in a swarm at all! They did say there was a Harbor Freight Tools about a mile south of us, though!
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And oh boy, the Penguins sure did get uneasy when we saw the ornithomimus on the loose at the Hartman Prehistoric Garden! This was the first sign, they proclaimed, that time itself was warping, that prehistoric monsters were being unleashed onto this plane, making room for their leader, Shackleton! I suggested that we go investigate the hardware store recommended by the bees, and the Penguins immediately led the charge!
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They procured some chicken wire, a little duct tape, and some plexiglass, and we headed back toward the city while they planned how the heck they were going to install it! With the skyline reflected in the waters of the Barton Springs Pool, it sure did fit the “as above, so below, here the rift will start to grow” prophecy that the Penguins had picked up from somewhere. And without any warning, they took their supplies, slipped into the water, and made off to stop Shackleton once more! I hope their plan doesn’t impact the eclipse in any way…
Though I missed my frenetic friends already, I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my second day in Austin in ho-hum mode. I’d brought my flamingo float along and spent the afternoon cruising delightedly along this three-acre pool that’s fed by an underground spring, allowing it to stay a perfect 68-70 degrees all year round!
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As I dried off to begin my journey back to the rental home for a night of carousing about town, I noticed something truly remarkable about these springs. They’re home to not one, but two super rare and endangered salamanders! The Austin blind (Eurycea waterlooensis) and Barton Springs (Eurycea sosorum) salamanders are endemic to these springs, meaning they’re found nowhere else in the world! Luckily, they’re mostly found in parts of the aquifer that are closed off to humans, but they’ve had a rough go of it, thanks to pool maintenance practices between 1970 and 1992. Fortunately for these unique critters, those practices have changed, more habitat has been walled off, and more aquatic plants have been reintroduced to give them more space to call home!
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The next day dawned with a lot of promise! There were thunderstorm warnings all leading up to Eclipse Day, which made all of us very nervous. I was even more nervous because I didn’t really understand what those Penguins would be capable of! Could they stop the eclipse with duct tape? Then the morning cloud cover began to clear, which made us all very excited! Deciding not to brave eclipse traffic today, we’d gathered snacks with the goal to hang out by the pool (another perk the first rental house lacked) until the 1:36 PM totality!
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It was looking good past noon! The shadows of the leaves were beginning to show the passing of the moon over the sun! Even after seeing two previous solar eclipses, I’d never seen this effect before, because I’d previously been in treeless deserts! This is because the gaps between tree leaves act like pinhole cameras, projecting the rapidly narrowing crescent shape onto the ground below!
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And then, catastrophe struck! A band of clouds rolled up five minutes before totality! Could this be the work of the Penguins? We could barely get glimpses of totality through thinner parts of the racing clouds, which lingered all the way until totality passed and the sun was once more too bright to look at directly!
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The challenge in scheduling a whole trip around a momentary astronomical event is that there’s absolutely no way to know what the weather will be on the day, a year in advance! Other parts of Texas got a nice clear view, but Austin was cloud covered throughout! That’s why I think it’s important to travel with friends for these things, because then, you can share that momentary disappointment and then make plans to have fun together, no matter the weather!
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That was also important because severe thunderstorms also canceled our kayak to the Congress Avenue Bat Bridge that evening and caused absolute chaos at the airport the following day! Our flight home was first delayed one hour, then two, then five! The airport itself was an absolute madhouse, so the group of us took control of a table and played Settlers of Catan until they found a new plane and got us en route back to Burbank with only a three total hour delay! After all was said and done, we’d still had a great experience roaming the Austin restaurant scene at night and enjoying some quiet time at the pool. We all made it home safely, and so, I’d say this was still a successful trip. The next eclipse is coming up in 2026, so maybe Madrid will be on our radar soon!
Later, sunshines!
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Total Ground Covered: 102.2 mi (164.5 km) |
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