August 21, 2017 -Near Casper to Cody, Wyoming

We got an early start this morning from our BLM campsite and headed down the road about 10 miles to Natrona, Wyoming for our eclipse viewing. It isn’t much more than a spot on the road, but there is a double-wide sized pullout that was perfect for our RV.  We had a lot of time to kill before the prime eclipse viewing, so I walked Penny along the county road. I stopped and talked to a couple different cars of people parked for the viewing. One couple had driven out from Wisconsin, the other from Texas. About 10 am, another car pulled in next to us, a man with his two teenage sons from Minnesota! It was quite the party.

We bought eclipse binoculars which gave us a little closer viewing than the glasses we had, although both were cool. It is difficult to describe the feelings we had viewing such an awesome sight!

The first couple pictures were taken through the binoculars using the solar filter. You can see the moon starting to take bites out of the sun.

The more the moon covered the sun, the cooler the temperature got. I ended up grabbing our jackets! During the totality of the eclipse, we were able to look directly at the sun without any glasses. It was amazing.  We were able to see a few stars and planets overhead, and it looked like sunset in all directions.  The pictures below were taken without any filters.

After the totality was over, it quickly got light again, and it was back to the solar glasses for viewing. We decided to have lunch before getting on the road toward Cody. After our lunch, we found out where all the traffic was that we didn’t see yesterday … it was in front of us! We had smooth sailing until five miles east of Shoshoni, then it came to a halt! We crawled along for those five miles, sometimes turning the RV off because we weren’t moving.

When we finally got into Shoshoni, I hopped out of the RV and went into the Malt shop to get a malt. It was really good, but they definitely had “eclipse” pricing – $7.00!!!

We bypassed the main intersection in town and were able to head north, but the traffic from Shoshoni all way the to Thermopolis was still bumper to bumper. We finally got into Cody about 5pm – four hours after leaving Natrona! We are camping on a city street near the city park tonight and plan to get an early start for Yellowstone in the morning.