by Lynn & John Salmon <>{
A total solar eclipse cut across the entire United States in 2017. While the location was not quite as exotic as our 2010 Total Eclipse of the Sun on Easter Island, it was a lot easier to get to.
The 2017 eclipse path cut a nice swath across the middle of the country, which gave us many choices for viewing options. We opted to fly to Denver, Colorado (easy with direct flights from JFK) and drive about 5 hours east to Kearney, Nebraska. This gave us access to the I-80 in case we needed to hop on the freeway and outrun cloud cover like we did for the 1999 solar eclipse in Germany. (We ended up viewing that one in a farmer's field in France.)
The Nebraska landscape of mostly treeless corn fields provided a perfect backdrop for eclipse viewing. Here's a set of links we found very useful for our trip planning: Nebraska Eclipse Links.
We did a little birding while in the area adding 9 species to our Bird List.
We arrived a couple of days before the eclipse to give us time to suss out optimum viewing locations. We stayed for 5 move days after the eclipse and did a little birding and geocaching on a loop drive through Kansas on the way back to Denver.
We found the 7th geocache ever created, the first one in Kansas and the oldest geocache still active today. It is GC30: Mingo.
A couple of other geocaches took us to cool geographic locations like the Three corners Virtual located at the junction of Kansas, Nebraka, and Colorado. Another geocache took us to Where the Handle Meets the Pan.
Lynn & John Salmon <>{