Where’s Nico?

Okay, let’s get back to the Talking Heads inspired post titles, after our short Nancy Sinatra detour. So, this wasn’t exactly a once-in-a-lifetime event for me or Kristen, but it has been so far for Nico – on April 8th, we enjoyed the solar eclipse in the heart of the Path of Totality. (Kristen and I both got to enjoy an eclipse when the Path of Totality passed through Kansas City on August 21, 2017).

But before we get to eclipse talk, I’m sure you’re asking yourself… Where’s Nico??? Well, this week’s answer is:

Redfield, Arkansas!

When we last caught up, we were in Talladega National Forest. We ended up spending a bit longer there, finally heading out to Sardis Lake in Mississippi on Wednesday, where we spent a day and then headed out to our campsite on the Arkansas River just outside of Redfield. Both of the campsites are very pretty, and would be nice for folks looking to do some water activities. We are more into hiking, and neither campsite really offered much along those lines. But we didn’t come here to hike – we came for the eclipse.

Redfield is just a bit south of Little Rock, which left it just outside the Path of Totality, but close enough for us to easily drive there on the big day. Even here, just outside the path, we saw our campground fill up in the days leading up to the eclipse as people from all over streamed to come see. We had folks from Georgia camping on our left and Ohio on our right, who came up for the big event. We carefully monitored weather forecasts, and settled on driving a couple hours up to Greers Ferry Lake, which was dead on in the heart of the the path – a place that was going to get one of the longest windows in the eclipse (over four minutes – and those four minutes were critical, as the difference between a 99.9% eclipse and a total eclipse, it turns out, is massive).

Okay, I may have went to the well once too often there, with two Bonnie Tyler-related memes, but they both cracked me up. We did not opt to listen to the song during the eclipse (although we listened to an eclipse-themed Spotify playlist on the drive up and back). Instead, we found a wonderful bend of a stream that we had to ourselves for the eclipse. The weather was amazing – and it was exactly the experience we had hoped for. My iPhone pics did the eclipse no justice, but it wasn’t about getting pictures – plenty of professionals will get great shots. It was about the experience, and it was wonderful.

Our viewing spot for the eclipse

Nico ignoring the advice not to look directly at the sun…

It surprised me how different it was from my experience in 2017. In 2017, as I mentioned, Kansas City found itself in the Path of Totality. Unfortunately, the skies were somewhat cloudy that day – I ended up ducking out of work for a long lunch hour and drove by myself about 45 minutes north of KC, where I found a window in the clouds and watched the total eclipse from the side of a rural highway. It was much shorter than this eclipse, and the actual appearance of the solar flares around the moon wasn’t anywhere as dramatic as it was today.

Also, I recall the birds all getting very quiet during that eclipse – this time, we were around a ton of birds, and they didn’t seem to react as much as I remembered the last time. Kristen has an app called Merlin on her phone which lets you record sounds around you and identifies the types of birds. We had around a dozen different types of birds around us for the eclipse today, and they carried on pretty much the same through the whole thing.

My favorite of our bird friends today

By the way, I was joking in the picture above where I said Nico was looking at the sun. He didn’t – he was just looking around. But it did remind me of another eclipse. In 1979, when I was in grade school we had a partial eclipse. The folks at Helen Lemme Elementary School let us “view” it through this pinhole projector we built, with the teachers warning us not to dare look at the sun or our eyeballs would burst into flames instantly. I remember a few years later when “Raiders of the Lost Ark” came out, I figured whoever came up for the visuals of the Nazis when they looked at the Ark of the Covenant were probably similarly traumatized as children.

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Before I end this week’s post, I did want to share a story of woe and, well, parental disappointment. I posted a list of “ear worm” songs on this blog the other day, and my own mother followed up in an email to me with a song so ear wormy in the most painful way that I’ve been having nightmares ever since. A song so insipid that I won’t even type it’s title in this post.

Seriously, if you’ve never been to Disneyland, well, then you basically missed out on an opportunity to wait in a bunch of lines all day. But at the end of one of those lines is this dumb boat ride that takes you past hundreds of little animatronic (or at least the 1960’s idea of animatronic, i.e. puppets that are shoved onto a hinge to swivel left and right endlessly) people, all singing this cloying song. Just in case your language of choice is not English, they go ahead and have the little characters sing it in a bunch of other languages to ensure that at least 99.9% of the riders will suffer the full effects of this.

Dear reader, if you don’t know the song I’m referring to, I beg you not to try to Google it. And presuming you do know the song, I am so sorry for now bringing it into your consciousness once again as I bemoan the cruelty that was inflicted upon me this week. I highly recommend you just put Talking Heads on Spotify and try to let them clear out the cache in your brain.

– Ken 4/8/2024