# McDowell Campground

Last modified by Richard Johnson on 2024/04/10 21:06
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Ok, so here's the grand plan:

When we looked at projected clouds over Texas 1-2 days ago, and even up until early Monday morning, there was a band of clouds directly over the eclipse path all of the way up to around Illinois! We found that it would be possible to change our viewing location to the small town of Poplar Bluff, MO and we would have a much better chance there. So, we decided to head in that direction, knowing we can still drop back down to our already reserved site at East Tawakoni if things change.

Well... As of this evening, it looks as if things may be changing!

(This is projected cloud cover map from Windy.com, for next Monday, April 8th at 2pm, the time of the eclipse in our current timezone.)

Our plan now is to continue toward our selected McDowell Campground site, east of Amarillo, and if the situation in Texas continues to improve, we can drop down to the Dallas area. If not, we will continue toward Poplar Bluff.

Tomorrow evening will probably decide it for us and then we'll see what happens.

oh, I almost forgot! There’s also a scheduled stop in Roswell… For Alien Socks!

So, how did it go? Well... We actually got out of the campground fairly early (for us) at 9am. We had about 6-7 hours of driving ahead of us and wanted to get to the McDowell campground while it was still light and hopefully early enough to get a spot (first come, first serve). However, we also wanted these "Alien Socks" from Roswell!

We drove through beautiful mountain passes still covered in snow with horses grazing:

We saw warnings of elk, but didn't see any:

We made it into Roswell, where we saw warnings of aliens:

But try as we may, we never found any Alien Socks.

So, we travelled on

Over perfectly straight roads for 100s of miles:

And the only indication we were entering Texas was the change of timezones:

Finally landing at McDowell Campground! We were worried about possibly not getting one of the small number of spots, but what we were not prepared for was the place being absolutely entirely empty! We drove through all 10 sites which have full hookups and selected the one we wanted because absolutely no one is here!

So... Here's the new plan:

We can actually put off the decision of whether to go farther north or back down toward Dallas by one more day! (And, when you don't actually need to make a decision, you shouldn't! Always put off decisions as long as possible because it gives the opportunity for more information to come in, which leads to a better decision. I give you this life lesson for free!)

Poplar Bluff currently is projected to have close to 0% cloud cover while the rest of Texas under the eclipse line has lots of clouds:

Given where we are, the trip to Poplar Bluff would be over 700 miles, so it would take another two days

If we split that in the middle, we end up around Fort Smith (or actually Van Buren, which is closer to the freeway). So, given we're there tomorrow, we could go either way:

We're really thinking seriously about Poplar Bluff. It looks as if east of Dallas will be under clouds.

Onward to Springhill Campground.

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Created by Richard Johnson on 2024/04/01 20:59

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