On eclipse morning, the whole sky was covered. Horrors!
After the Gobi, we felt confident enough to do the next one ourselves. I’m familiar with Shanghai, so this seemed easy. We flew in three days early and picked the Sun Island Resort, slightly inland, with a golf course — perfect, we thought: a round of golf and a totality.
For three mornings in a row, at 8:30am, the sky was bright and clear. Not a cloud. Then, on eclipse morning, the whole sky was covered with a layer of puffy cotton clouds, as far as the eye could see. Horrors!
The group we’d been with in 2008 was also in Shanghai — but they had experts studying the cloud statistics, and in the middle of the night the whole group flew to Hangzhou to get ahead of the clouds rolling in from the sea. We rushed a taxi towards the coast, hoping the clouds would move inland faster than we did. They didn’t. We were rained out just before second contact. Failed.
You plan, and on the day, at the very moment, it fails. It happens. If you can find an alternative quickly, you do. If not — that’s it. Next time. One success, followed straight away by one failure: that is exactly what spurred us on to keep going.