Solar Eclipse Follies #2

On the unexpected occasion of my 60th birthday, I thought I'd write up a few of my Stories, while I can still remember (or make up) a reasonable portion of them, complete with entirely bogus, Photoshopped, or made up, images. None of the following may be terribly true or accurate, but it's how I remember it.

After the success (?) of our first solar eclipse trip, Johnny and I decided that we needed to see another one, and how could it go any worse than the first time?

It's May 30, 1984, and this time it'll pass over Guadalajara Mexico, which (fortunately) precludes our just driving there like last time. We book flights to, and a hotel in, Guadalajara, and hope that my two years of high school Spanish will get us by. (Johnny had taken Latin, but nobody in "Latin" America actually speaks it. Go figure.)

The flight is uneventful, and when we get to the hotel, Johnny courageously reserves a rental car from a guy sitting behind a card table in the lobby. Let me say that again: A guy sitting behind a card table in the lobby.

The eclipse is at 7:30 the next morning, so we have some time to kill, and go out wandering. All I remember is the "market" that's like a swap meet set up in an abandoned parking structure. Unsurprisingly, we didn't find anything that we couldn't live without...

I do remember a guy selling sodas, and when you'd buy one, he'd pull a bottle out of the ice chest, pop it open, pour it into a "sandwich size" plastic bag, stick a straw in it, and hand it to you, keeping the bottle. Pretty cool -- no need to drag the glass part back to a recycling center. "Have a (baggie of) Coke and a smile." ™

We leave the hotel early in the morning in the rented little red Japanese hatchback. No giant telescope this time, but that's OK -- it's the "big picture" that's more amazing anyway. We head west, for some reason, coming pretty quickly to open country. The sky is nice and clear.

But as the eclipse time approaches, high clouds start to appear. We search the sky for a clear spot, and drive toward it as best we can, given the limited roads out there.

We pass turnouts along the way that have busloads of Eclipse Hunters, setting up telescopes and getting ready. A lot of them have matching T-shirts with some cheap eclipse clipart and a pun-laden name of the eclipse expedition. But others have custom made uber-geeky T-shirts with a minutes and seconds figure on them -- their personal total time spent Under Totality. Which... I think I need one of those...

As the eclipse approaches, we turn south onto a dirt road that leads to a tiny Mexican village that looks like a movie set where the banditos are terrorizing the villagers until the handsome stranger shows up. We start to realize that there's no piece of sky that's clear anymore -- it's early in the morning and the air is cool, and the shadow of the moon itself is causing it to cool down even more, condensing out clouds as it goes.

We're kind of stuck where we are in this village 'cuz there aren't any roads left. We're not really out in the open like last time, so we don't see the shadow of the moon racing towards us, but we are in a rural village so we get to see the truth of the story that the chickens think it's nighttime and try to go to roost.

The eclipse is slightly obscured by the custom-made high clouds, but they're pretty thin so we can still see it reasonably well. The corona's mostly washed out, though.

A couple of minutes and it's all over. Not as mind boggling as the first one (ain't it always that way?), but still worth every nickel.

It's not even 8am, and we have a whole day to kill before our flight home the next day, so we go into downtown Guadalajara for some sight-seeing. Mostly we look at the old buildings which Architect Johnny is far more interested in than I am, but I gotta admit they're pretty cool. We decide to park the car and walk around a while, and pull onto a back street. It's pretty packed with cars, but we find a space.

I really don't remember what we looked at, so it was probably more old buildings, but when we get back to the car, it's gone. We walk up and down the street, thinking we're just lost, but can't find the car. There is, a few blocks away, an almost handmade little sign on a post that might mention something about parking, but I can't really tell with the peeling paint and my limited Spanish. It certainly did *not* say simply "No Parking" (in any language) nor have an easy-to-guess red circle with a slash in it.

Having no other options, we go back to the hotel, wondering if the insurance covers both scratches and out-an-out auto theft. As I calm down I start to think that, since our flight is tomorrow, we don't actually *need* the car any more anyway -- all our stuff is at the hotel and not in the car. Johnny points out that that's not exactly true -- his bookbag that he never goes anywhere without, even to eclipses, was in the car. And what's in the bag? Some books, some papers, and his passport.

When we get back to the hotel lobby, ready to confess, there's nobody at the car rental card table. We wait in the room, freaking out, and keep checking the lobby. We try to come up with alternate plans, but we're not worldly enough to figure out a way to get Johnny out of Mexico without a passport. Where's the Embassy? What's a "Consulate", anyway? We start to wonder what kind of jobs a couple of one-language gringos can get in Guadalajara.

Finally Mr. Cardtable comes back and we tell him that the car got stolen. We don't know exactly where -- somewhere in Mexico, we're pretty sure. Surprisingly, he's all smiles and "Ha ha ha! Don't worry about a thing! I'll take care of you!" We're baffled at how he can be so unconcerned, and start to wonder if this not only happens "all the time" but if it happens, *literally*, all the time. Maybe Cardtable here rents the cars out, and his "associates" steal them back. Come to that, where has *he* been all this time...?

Suddenly, the flight tomorrow that seemed so much time to burn away, now feels like a ticking time bomb, without that passport. Will Cardtable find the passport in time for the flight, or will we have to try to get our flights changed to the next day? Or week? Or month?

We sweat out the evening and go to bed. In the morning we go down to the lobby and Ta Daa! "Here's your bag! Everything still in it! You were in a "No Parking" zone and the cops towed the car. Just a misunderstanding! No problem! No extra charge for the towing, fines, bribes, etc.!"

Gee, thanks a million, Mr. Cardtable! We're sorry for all those bad things we said about you last night!

So we make it to our flight on time, and home with no further incidents and with a few more minutes and seconds of Totality under our belts.