As my for you page was filled with videos of people all over the world preparing to travel or go out into their backyard for the 2024 Solar Eclipse, I was excited to find out that there were people from VCU making the journey to Ohio. The goal was to be in a location where they could see the eclipse at complete totality, and they did exactly that!
VCU students Seth Brand, Madi Welch, and Sierra Gotshall got in their car on Sunday with minimal plans and drove seven hours to Youngstown, Ohio where their hotel room was only about $250 for the night. Other hotels directly in Erie County were over $700, due to the mass amounts of people traveling to see the eclipse.
Once they reached their destination, they got dinner at Chipotle and spent the night playing Just Dance and Mario Party. The students explained that there wasn’t much to do in Youngstown, but that they were just excited to be there!
The next day, the students headed to a small town called Euclid where they hung out at a public library. There, they did homework and relaxed for several hours before it was time to go see the eclipse. Euclid was near a portion of Lake Erie so the students found a spot at the park to watch it from on the water!
The students also got to witness a ‘diamond ring effect’ where a tiny sliver of light peaked out that was almost like glitter and able to be seen without glasses. This was due to the solar corona forming a faint ring around the moon, while the sun continued to shrink to a small crescent. This can only be seen around 15 seconds before the start of complete totality!
“When totality hit it was like the world instantly turned to dusk in every direction,” Brand said. “The sun had turned black which was absolutely surreal.”
When it became dark, the seabirds landed in the water and crickets began chirping due to thinking it was night time. The students described this occurrence as ‘crazy’ and they plan to do it again in a few decades.
However, as seen on social media, they confirmed that the post-eclipse traffic was a nightmare on the way back to Virginia. The immense amounts of traffic caused a seven hour drive to be turned into a 12-hour drive! Regardless of this, they are grateful for the experience and were thrilled to be a part of the thousands of people that drove to see such a natural phenomenon.