11 August 1999

   On eclipse day we are 100 miles east of Paris in Chaumont, a town which is distinguished by the fact that it had a hotel room driving distance from the eclipse totality that was available on-line.
       We've had an erratic shifting mix of rain and sun every day this trip, but this morning there is no bluster, just clouds and showers, and this is the day that matters.  The success of the trip depends on it, our hope and our denial mixing in equal parts since we committed to an easy trip to France rather than one somewhat less so to north-central Turkey, where the sun was more certain to shine.   Last year we'd braved the interior of Colombia, and were rewarded with a perfect day and nearly 4 minutes of eclipse darkness; now, two minutes of a clear view of the obscured solar disc is the only way this trip to the heart of western tourism will been redeemed.  

We wake to a festival organizer in Cornwall, England, complaining to CNN that rumors of gridlock, anarchists and solar blindness have kept the crowds away from their biggest tourist opportunity in years.  Or perhaps it was Cornwall's 70-percent chance of cloud cover.  Here in France, we learn, the government has distributed some 6 million pairs of cardboard and mylar sunglasses. Informative posters are everywhere, a concerted fear campaign giving locals the heeby-jeebies that a glance sunward will bring instant blindness. The weather report that follows is vague and not encouraging. 

This town was picked from a map and, heading north, we are navigating by luck and Michelin towards a region, a town I'd imagined months before: somewhere in the middle of the line of totality, far from cities and on one of those green-line "scenic routes" winding into the yellow Champagne countryside: "Grandpre" it was to be, or somewhere on the way.  next