My husband, Quent, and I are currently on a 2-week RV road trip from Colorado to Texas to view the April 8 total solar eclipse. We planned this trip months ago — a carefully detailed itinerary to ensure we had campgrounds to stay at (and dear friends to stay with!) when hundreds of thousands of people were predicted to travel to the path of totality during this awe-inspiring celestial phenomenon.
Have you been following national weather forecasts? If you’re not an eclipse chaser, perhaps you’re not. So I’ll share the scoop: With six days to go until the Big Event, forecasts are calling for CLOUDS over much of Texas — which was supposed to be the BEST place to view the solar eclipse, due to historic weather trends.
I turned to Quent the other day, when we started tracking eclipse-day weather, and said, “This reminds me of the time we planned the kids’ first trip to the Grand Canyon and we got fogged out!”
That foggy 2013 trip to the Grand Canyon has become one of our family’s catchphrases whenever we encounter crap weather. We hiked to the top of Mount Major in New Hampshire one summer vacation a couple of years later, only to find dense-as-pea-soup fog blocking what is typically an incredibly expansive view of Lake Winnipesaukee: “This is giving me Grand Canyon vibes.”
I couldn’t believe our (bad) luck on that 2013 family road trip, when the once-in-a-decade “temperature inversion” meant we couldn’t show the kids the Grand Canyon (since we only had one day at the national park, as it was part of a longer road trip to California for Thanksgiving). Yet, now the story is part of family lore. We regularly retell the fog saga as part of our, “Remember that time, when…” memories when we gather around the dinner table. (Our kids are now 22 and 24, and living on their own, so those gatherings don’t happen often these days!)
As I learned early in writing about family travel — which I’ve done since my children were itty-bitty and I edited our local Mountain Parent magazine and then co-ran a family travel blog for years until we sold it — disaster stories make the BEST stories. Grand Canyon fog ranks right up there with the time:
- Our family slept overnight on the floor at Denver International Airport’s Gate B44 when flights home to Aspen were canceled, and some huge convention meant zero hotels were available.
- Three-year-old Ben got stung by a jellyfish in Mexico.
- Both kids got sun poisoning in Mexico after dipping their hands in lemonade (WHY did they stick their hands in their glasses of lemonade?)
- Eight-year-old Kaylin sprained her ankle jumping off Grammie’s lakehouse rope swing and spent the rest of summer vacation on crutches.
- Kara had to go to the ER in Mexico for a scratched cornea after tumbling in rough waves. (Mexico clearly factors prominently in our vacations gone bad. Still, we return. Because it’s awesome.)
- Quent and Kara neglected to get visas to enter Vietnam to visit college student Kaylin who was on Semester at Sea, and we had to hand over a ridiculous amount of U.S. cash to border control to get emergency paperwork approved. (Rookie mistake. How did we miss this visa requirement??)
- Our first motorhome broke down on a much-anticipated road trip to California national parks, necessitating a last-minute RV rental.
True to Williams Family form, this current road trip is giving us Grand Canyon vibes in more ways than one.
On our way to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona a couple days ago, Quent had to slam on the brakes of our 35-foot motorhome (“CC”), which is towing my Honda CRV. A stupid driver coming our way in the opposite lane didn’t have a turn blinker on, so cars behind him had to slip out into other lanes to avoid hitting that guy when he stopped at a corner, and one car looked as if it was going to hit us (before going off into a small ditch).
Thankfully, we avoided impact there and carried on, but we’re pretty sure the incident caused slight damage to the tires, which was discovered after we had them balanced at Big O Tires in Roswell, N.M. However, the thump-thump noise we heard the last few hundred miles wasn’t due to them being imbalanced, rather one is flattened on one side, so I’m writing this as we head down the highway (safely, Mom, I promise) to Carlsbad, N.M., to another Big O Tires to get two brand-new tires put on.*
This whole tire issue is annoying. It’s putting us off schedule. It means we’re going to pull into our next campground late. It means the outdoor grilled meal I’ve been anticipating for nights is likely not going to happen. (Rainy, cold, windy weather has kept us inside the RV since the start of our trip five days ago.)
But all this stuff is SUCH SMALL POTATOES — a theme I keep returning to here on this long-neglected blog and in social media (which I update more often). Yes, wrecked travel plans and vacation inconveniences are disappointing, but they aren’t typically life-altering or life-threatening!
Take our Grand Canyon trip in 2013. Yeah, that was a bummer. But then we returned in 2016 and rafted the Colorado River with the kids. A full week on a raft in the Grand Canyon with strangers, pooping in a hoover and sleeping in cots on the sand. Massive amounts of memories made! AMAZING!
Back when we tried to go to Vietnam in February 2020 without visas in our passports, Quent basically bribed officials, and we were able to enter the country in the 11th hour. We ended up having a spectacular visit with our daughter in Hoi An — before her Semester at Sea experience got truncated weeks later due to COVID-19 and she had to fly home from South Africa. (Don’t feel too bad for her; girlfriend went to Europe THREE DIFFERENT TIMES to travel or meet up with friends in spring-summer 2023.)
My point: The most disappointing travel mishaps at the time are usually entertaining stories weeks, months, or years later. And as often as an experience might be billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event, oftentimes it’s not!
It’s been nearly seven years since the 2017 total solar eclipse — which we watched on the side of the road in Wyoming — after which we said, “We need to experience another one!” Again, this current trip we’re on has been planned for weeks, all centered around a 4-minute celestial event that, as it turns out, may or may not be viewable due to weather.
But you know what? We’re visiting an area of the country we haven’t been to before. We’re getting to two new-to-me national parks (I’m on a quest to visit all of them in the continental U.S.). We’re meeting up with family and hanging out with good friends. We’re going to eat yummy barbecue. We’re going to see beautiful wildflowers. I know we’re going to have lots of laughs — whether we watch the sky turn dark midday as the moon blocks out the sun or not.
(In the meantime, however, I’m researching where the next total solar eclipse will be. Bilbao, Spain, in August 2026, anyone? Besides you, Amber L. I know you’re in.)
Just yesterday, my longtime friend Karen reminded me that I helped her learn: “Stuff happens when you travel” and “It’s all an adventure.”
Indeed. That’s why we do it, right? Loads better than sitting at home.
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*By the end of typing up this tale, we learned that Big O Tires in Carlsbad doesn’t have the correct tires to replace our front ones that are making weird noises after the quick brake slam in Arizona. We’re now carrying on to our next stop in Texas — safely, I promise, Mom — to seek a fix in the morning.