We pulled into the parking lot at the Homewood Suites in Pinehurst, North Carolina, Monday morning just before 5:30 a.m. It was still dark, as it had been the entire eight-hour drive down I-95 from suburban Philadelphia, but the sunrise was in about an hour. We didn’t have a room at the hotel. Like every other one in the vicinity, it was sold out, full of travelers all with the same purpose—to see Eclipse 2017. So we headed for the shadiest and most remote part of the parking lot, cut the engine, reclined our seats and almost instantly fell asleep.
It was T-minus eight hours and counting until the start of the first total eclipse over the United States in almost 40 years, and we—my fiancé, his daughter, and I—had driven all night to get as close to the “path of totality” as we could. A spontaneous 30-hour adventure we’d decided to embark on just a few hours before getting in the car.
