The wife and I just got back from almost a week in Spain chasing the total solar eclipse, and yes, I am officially exhausted. Our first total solar eclipse was Dallas in 2024. We went down there to see it, absolutely loved the experience, and pretty much decided right then that we were hooked. So I guess we're eclipse chasers now, or at least aspiring eclipse chasers. We're only two eclipses in, so I don't know if we've earned the merit badge yet.

My wife made this one the morning of the eclipse. I wish. LOL.

Our basic rule is that we'll travel for an eclipse when it's realistic. I'm not going somewhere dangerous just because the moon happens to be passing in front of the sun there, and I'm also not spending a week traveling somewhere that historically has a lousy chance of clear skies (1). That was one of the reasons we picked Spain this time. The eclipse path also crossed Greenland and Iceland, which would have been amazing places to see it, but the weather prospects weren't nearly as good. As predicted, they didn't exactly have cooperative skies. Spain looked like our best bet, so we signed up for one of the Sky & Telescope eclipse tours. My thinking was pretty simple: if anybody should know where to put a bunch of astronomy nerds to watch an eclipse, these guys should. And they did a great job.

Wife watches Friends. I watch the flight tracker.

We flew into Barcelona first and spent a couple of days there. We did some walking around the city and saw some of the sights, including the Sagrada Familia. Now, I know I'm probably going to offend some architecture fans here, but I wasn't impressed. I love Gothic architecture. I love old churches, castles, cathedrals, all that stuff. I saw Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it, so I figured the Sagrada Familia would be right up my alley. Nope. Sorry, Gaudi fans. To me, it just looked chaotic. There's so much going on everywhere that my brain couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be looking at. I can certainly appreciate the amount of work and artistry that went into it, but the style just wasn't for me.

I'm sorry, it just looks like melting clay.

We saw some other interesting buildings around Barcelona too and did plenty of walking. By the end of that part of the trip, my feet had officially filed a grievance with management. They were demanding better working conditions, fewer cobblestones, and possibly union representation.

In addition to my feet, my sweat glands operated on overdrive the whole week. If you haven't seen it in the news, much of Europe has been suffering through one of its hottest summers on record, and let me tell you, it was hot, sweaty balls in all of Spain. We live in Southwest Florida, so heat and humidity aren't exactly new concepts to us. The difference is that Florida is built for it. We have powerful air conditioning everywhere. Our houses, cars, stores, restaurants, hotels, and pretty much every other indoor space are designed around the assumption that outside is trying to kill you. In Barcelona, they're just not accustomed to this kind of sustained heat. A lot of places don't have air conditioning at all, and some of the places that do seem to have what I would describe as "air conditioning adjacent." You walk inside expecting that glorious blast of cold air and instead get a gentle suggestion that perhaps the room could be slightly less hot. The city simply wasn't designed for temperatures like these, and unfortunately that's becoming a much bigger problem across Europe as the planet continues to warm. But hey, let's just keep pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and see how this experiment turns out. I'm sure it'll be fine.

From Barcelona, we took a little hopper flight over to Mallorca. We flew into Palma de Mallorca, but our hotel, the Jumeirah Mallorca, was in Port de Soller, about an hour away. The eclipse tour had picked a location with an excellent view toward the setting sun, which was particularly important because this eclipse was going to happen extremely low on the horizon. The hotel was beautiful, and sat on a cliff facing the sea. Excellent views.

View of Port de Soller from the hotel

And this is where Mother Nature decided to have a little fun with us. The day of the eclipse was mostly sunny. Things were looking great, everybody was excited, and we had our solar glasses and filters ready. For most of the partial phase we could clearly watch the moon slowly covering the sun. The tricky part with this eclipse was that totality happened extremely low in the sky from our location, only about 2.5 degrees above the horizon.

My wife looking right where I told her not to look

Only having to shield one eye has advantages. And I get funny looks from everyone.

Wouldn't you know it, about half an hour before the main event, clouds started building right where we needed the sky to remain clear. We kept watching as the moon covered more and more of the sun, and then right before totality, clouds.

This was at about 95% coverage

Even though we didn't actually get to see the Sun/Moon during totality, aside from the tiniest little glimpse through the clouds, the 90 seconds of totality were still pretty cool. From where we were standing, we had a very clear view of the horizon, and we could actually watch the Moon's shadow moving across the clouds, the sky, and the water. You can see it in the picture I'm posting here: it's still bright off to the right and left, north and south of us, but looking due west toward the Sun, everything is dark. Standing there and actually watching that enormous shadow sweep across the landscape was pretty amazing. Ironically, that's something the clouds actually made easier to see, so I guess they weren't completely useless. One of these days I'll post some of the video too, because I did manage to get some footage of it.

Totality. Meh.

Of course. The funny part is that this was almost exactly the opposite of what happened to us in Dallas in 2024. Dallas was cloudy for most of the eclipse, and then shortly before totality the clouds miraculously cleared and we got a fantastic view. Spain apparently decided that was far too generous. This time it was clear most of the day, and then the clouds rolled in right when they could do maximum emotional damage.

We missed totality, and then, just to rub it in, about five or ten minutes afterward the clouds cleared again. Thanks. We did get to watch the partially eclipsed sun setting over the horizon afterward, which was actually very cool. So the evening wasn't a complete loss. But after traveling all the way to Spain specifically to see totality, yeah, it was definitely a bit of a dud. That's apparently the heartbreak of being an eclipse chaser. Although after only two eclipses, I suppose I'm still technically an eclipse-chaser-in-training.

Setting partially-eclipsed sun

Overall, though, it was still a decent trip. Barcelona was interesting, Mallorca was beautiful, and we had a good time. But it was exhausting, and the trip home apparently wanted to make sure we understood the meaning of that word. Our first flight out of Mallorca was around 7 AM, which meant getting up around 3 AM to leave the hotel. By this point we'd been in Spain almost a week, so our bodies had finally adjusted to the six-hour time difference. Naturally, that's exactly when it was time to go home and screw them up again.

We flew back to Barcelona, where we were supposed to catch the long flight back to Atlanta. That's when we discovered that our Barcelona-to-Atlanta flight had been delayed about five hours because of a mechanical problem. So now we had something like six or seven hours to kill at Barcelona Airport. I'll give Barcelona Airport credit: it's a nice airport. But compared with big American airports, there aren't nearly as many full-service restaurants. There are lots of bakeries and little places where you can get coffee, pastries, or a sandwich, but not nearly as many places where you can just sit down, order a meal, and kill a couple of hours. After almost a week of walking around Spain, "let's wander around the airport for six hours" was not high on my list of recreational activities.

Older plane on the way home, definitely giving off that early 90s LCD flat-screen vibe

Eventually we got on the plane and made the roughly ten-hour flight back to Atlanta. Because of the delay, our original connection was gone, so they put us on another flight from Atlanta to Fort Myers. We had about 45 minutes to make that connection, and Atlanta has that wonderful international-arrival procedure where you get off the airplane, go through immigration, pick up your checked luggage, walk it over somewhere else, give it back to them, and then make your way to the domestic connection. I've never understood this process. "You've successfully transported my suitcase across the Atlantic Ocean. Excellent work. Now please give it to me for three minutes so I can hand it back to you."

Fortunately, by then it was around 11 PM and the airport wasn't terribly busy. If we'd arrived in the middle of the day with long lines, there's absolutely no way we would have made that connection. But we did, and we finally got back home around 2 AM. By this point my internal clock had completely given up. I knew we'd started traveling home on Thursday morning, and for some reason my brain had decided that by the time we finally got home it must be Friday night. As we pulled onto our street, I noticed everybody's garbage cans were still sitting out. I remember thinking, "Why hasn't anybody brought their garbage cans in? Was there a holiday or something?"

So I actually asked Alexa if there had been a holiday this past week. She came back with something about Victory Day in Rhode Island. I'm sitting there thinking, "What?" Then eventually the remaining three functioning neurons in my brain got together and figured it out. Yes, it was Friday, but it was 2 AM Friday morning. Garbage Day hadn't happened yet. The garbage cans weren't still out. They had just been put out. So naturally, after getting up at 3 AM in Spain, spending most of the day in airports and airplanes, crossing the Atlantic, racing through Atlanta, and finally making it home, I proceeded to take my garbage cans to the curb. Welcome home.

At that point, any reasonable person would have gone directly to bed. There was, however, one small problem. It had been Thursday, which meant a new episode of Star Trek had been released while we were traveling. I knew perfectly well what was going to happen if I tried to go to sleep without watching it. My brain would just lie there saying, "I don't care how tired you are. There's new Star Trek to watch. You're not going to sleep until you watch it." So, of course, I watched Star Trek.

The problem with watching Star Trek is that instead of making me sleepy, it jazzed me back up. I'd taken a little sleep medication, but apparently it was no match for new Star Trek. Then I realized that the new season of Reacher had also started while we were gone. I love Reacher. So since I was wide awake anyway, I figured I'd watch an episode of that too. Unfortunately, I hadn't realized they'd dropped three episodes at once. Somewhere during episode two, though, the sleepy meds finally began defeating the combined forces of jet lag, Star Trek, and Reacher, so I finally called it quits. I still have episode three waiting for me tonight, so at least I've got that to look forward to.

I finally fell asleep around 6 AM and slept until about 3 PM today. So yes, I'm back. Yes, I'm alive. And yes, I'm sitting at my desk as I write this at about 8:30 PM, although I'm not entirely convinced my brain has arrived back in Florida yet. My body still feels like its six hours in the future. I'm going to try to get some customer service emails done tonight. I know a few of you have been waiting for me to take care of things that I couldn't handle while I was away. I also need to get the Publix tonight because there's no food in the house. I made sure to eat anything perishable before we left. Diet be damned. Vacation starts officially 12 hours before you depart for the airport. LOL.

I was actually able to answer quite a few emails during the trip because one of the things I've been working on recently is improving my customer service system so I can handle more things remotely. Normally, most of my customer information lives in my Access database, which isn't terribly convenient when I'm standing in an airport with just my phone. I can always pull out the laptop and remote into my office computer, but that's a pain. So before the trip I started connecting some of that database information through SQL Server to my website and built myself a simple mobile interface. I still can't do everything remotely, but now I can pull up enough information to answer quite a few customer service questions without firing up the laptop and remotely connecting to my main database.

I've been building and refining the Access database that runs my business for more than 20 years, so moving everything online isn't something I'm going to do overnight. The critical stuff, like customer information and credit card data, stays secured on my local SQL Server and isn't sitting on the website. For customer service, I've built more of a hybrid system: your message starts on the website, synchronizes down to my local SQL Server/Access system, and then the information I need gets synchronized back up to the website customer service database so I can access it remotely. If your message survives that round trip through all the checks, balances, synchronizations, moving parts, chemical structures, warp conduits, and whatever else I've got going on in there, I can answer it from my phone. So far, everything seems to have survived.

The big advantage is that I'm not completely dependent on an Internet connection. I see businesses all the time that lose Internet access and suddenly nobody can do anything. How many times have you heard "sorry, our Internet is down, we can't access your account." With a proper hybrid system, the local database keeps working, and when the connection comes back, everything synchronizes again. Your phone already works much the same way with things like your calendar and email. You've got a local copy to work with in case you lose Internet connection. I'm not interested in simply moving my entire database to the web. I want the best of both worlds: local reliability when the Internet is down and remote access when I'm away. That's why it's taking me so long to migrate it. Plus I've got about 1.21 Giga-tables to move. :/

And yes, lessons on doing that kind of thing are coming. Technically, I already cover the pieces you need in my SQL Server Online Seminar, but I'll be doing more with this particular kind of setup because it turned out to be extremely useful while traveling. In fact, sitting around airports with nothing to do gave me plenty of time to think of more things I want to add to it. Apparently even when I'm supposed to be on vacation, 88% of my brain is still sitting at the computer designing databases.

So that's pretty much my week: Barcelona, Mallorca, lots of walking, one architect whose work apparently isn't my cup of tea, one eclipse hidden behind a strategically positioned cloud, approximately seventeen years spent sitting in airports, a garbage-day temporal anomaly, Star Trek, Reacher, and enough jet lag that I'm currently not entirely sure what day it is. Would I do this exact trip again knowing that we weren't going to see totality? Probably not. But that's the deal when you chase eclipses. You can plan the location, study historical weather, pick the best viewing site you can find, travel halfway around the world, and Mother Nature still gets the final vote. We got lucky in Dallas. This time, the clouds won. There will be another one.

Anyway, that's my adventure for the week. I'm back at my desk, getting caught up, and looking forward to getting back into my normal routine. How was your week? Do anything interesting while I was gone? Hopefully whatever you did involved fewer airports. :)

LLAP
RR

(1) I will make an exception for Antarctica in 2039 because Penguins.