St. Louis work trip... bookending the North America Eclipse!!!

Work work work. I spent several days working with the dudes on Networking stuff and some training. On Friday afternoon, I tagged along while the guys went to Microcenter and this was my first introduction to a raspberry pi. Travis convinced me to get one and I spent the rest of the day playing with it until way too late.

Saturday

I went to the City museum which was a crazy hodgepodge assembly of buildings/structures/passages and walkways. Trippy place and something I would have loved to run and climb around as a kid. I took a cab to Arch. Which was pretty. Grabbed a cab to Pappy's bbq. Waited almost an hour outside in line but got in and had tasty, tasty ribs. Then, of course, I went back to the office and played with a Raspberry pi. It's now a Retro video game emulator and I'm playing Super Mario 3.

Sunday:

Went to the zoo early in the day before the weather got super hot. Penguins, puffins, looked for but didn't find otters.

Back to the hotel for a shower because I didn't end up missing the heat, then back to the office to play with the Raspberry Pi some more.

Eclipse day!!!!!!

Monday

caught an uber to Fenton which is about 15 miles SW of the hotel in St. Louis. And took it to the McDonalds at a truckstop! Sipped diet coke, worked, took occasional breaks to check the moon's progress and had a burger until around 12:50. Then focused on geeking out over this incredible experience.

There were 3 other families that had decided on this parking lot / food stop as well and we talked a bit. There was one dad-engineering type that I got along with so we chatted while waiting for totality. He was clever and made a pinhole viewer with a business card.

I tried getting some pictures of the progressing eclipse both through the glasses and with just my phone, but the camera was terrible and no dice. What I did end up recording though, was a video. It got our reaction and enough visuals to get a sense of our experience.

For the rest of the week I've been trying to find pictures to send to people to somehow convey the actual view during and these were as close as I could get.

It never got completely dark, but the day got deeep blue and you could see stars, the planets and the incredible wispy glow of the corona. It lasted about 2 minutes as I didn't drive far enough down to get to max-eclipse-time. Absolutely gorgeous.

Afterwards I headed somewhere slightly more upscale for lunch and then back to the office to finish up some work.

Rest of the trip was all work, but extremely satisfying networking stuffs.