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The weather in my ancestral homeland looked OK, so we decided to do the drive. Google said it was a grand total 9 hours of driving in one day, which is a lot, but we decided to do it.

We got on the road before 5:30 in the morning and headed north off the highway up the backside of New Hampshire into Vermont as the sun slowly rose.

My wife had wanted to go to "The Sparkle Barn" for some time. So, we stopped there, even if a bit out of our way.
https://www.thesparklebarn.com/about

It was too far south to be in the total eclipse path, so we knew we couldn’t spend too much time there before going farther north, but we got there before it opened so went and had breakfast first.

Even after breakfast they weren’t open, so we waited in their outdoor garden with musical sculpture and watched a forklift operator do a great job unloading.

We did watch a LOT of cars go by headed north, but the roads still looked OK.

As soon as they opened, we went in.

After 1/2 hour there, we headed north again ourselves for about a 2 1/2 hour drive to the town my father grew up in.

Our first stop was my father and his family’s final resting place.
I had thought to watch the eclipse with one foot on my father’s grave and another on my grandfathers as they both had the same name as me. But, my grandmother was between them and I didn’t want to stretch for that length of time…

Albert Rich buried both my father and grandfather 65 years apart. Sadly he has joined them there.

The sun was still shining, so we went for lunch.

We did drive by the only family house with it’s nice mountain view.

Then, lunch at the local diner.

Post lunch we went out to the baseball field behind the diner and watched the sun go out.

You could see the moon’s shadow coming on the clouds.

My photos of it being total aren’t great. Sad.
But, it was fantastic to watch.

You could see the end of it coming on the clouds too.

We tried to beat the traffic home and failed.
We spent a lot of time just sitting there. It did let me see animal bones in the center of the highway, but sadly not much else of interest.