“I can drive to the path of totality!” I said. “And in just one day! I’ll make a vacation out of it!”

I think I wound up in the only place in New York where the skies were completely overcast. Sunday was beautiful; mild temperatures and completely clear skies. Tuesday was unseasonably warm, with a few scattered clouds and a high, thin haze.

But on Eclipse Day, at 3:15 in the afternoon…..

Not pictured: Old man yelling

And because of the cloud cover, almost all of the eclipse phenomena – sudden drop in temperature, weird animal behavior – didn’t happen. All we got was the “twilight all the way around the horizon”.

Looking towards the City of Rochester

We also noted that it seemed to get lighter much faster than it got dark….

Well, at least the Casa Larga Vineyards had a very nice “Toast to Totality” event. I might have stayed there a bit longer (it lasted to 5 pm), but a little after four o’clock, a light drizzle started.

Ya know, I’m not sure I care for all these wineries becoming “event spaces” with sales rooms attached to them. I’d love to chat with the winery staff (NOT the sales staff) about their vines and grapes and how they deal with pests and how they are coping with global warming. Or how it seems that there are so many competitions these days that pretty much any winery can win some medals, or how a person’s particular sense of taste might affect how they enjoy a particular wine – there might be an equivalent to “color blindness” for taste, and we do know that your sense of hearing changes as you get older…. I suppose they’ve got to make extra money somehow…..

But anyway, my trip to Rochester wasn’t a complete waste – I made plans to do other things there, and I’ll tell you about them in the next few posts.