My wife and I drove to Rexburg Idaho and my son and three of his kids were in a separate car. We left Logan UT at about 4:00 am. There had to be 20 cars heading north for each car heading south on I-15. Still, traffic moved right along the whole way. I was expecting gridlock in Rexburg with all the cars, but we didn't see any traffic issues until it was over. We saw a few signs offering parking for $25.00. I hope nobody fell for that.
We went to Porter Park, mainly because there were bathrooms there and at least a dozen porta-potties. There were no parking spaces directly next to the park, but we found spots a hundred feet from the corner. Parking was about the only thing that would have been better with a motorcycle. There were probably 500 people in the park when the eclipse started. The largest group was two busloads of people from an astronomy club in France. They all brought their telescopes and all sorts of viewing devices. I met a couple from Mali and a guy from Belgium, plus at least a dozen Canadians who had driven down.
Seeing two minutes of total eclipse was worth it. The crowd cheered when the first tiny chunk of the sun started to go away, then cheered for about 30 seconds as the moon finally covered the sun. It was an amazing view, but those two minutes seemed to fly by very quickly. Here is an animation I made with four photos taken from total eclipse to the "diamond ring" part when it very quickly got too bright to look at or photograph without a filter. These are my photos taken using a tripod with my Canon SX-50 zoomed out all the way with nothing in front of the lens. I held some viewing glasses in front for the partial images.
It would have been hard to find a better viewing spot than where we were in Rexburg, since the sky was totally clear and we had two whole minutes of total eclipse.
Getting out of Rexburg was terrible. Being a state that doesn't allow lane splitting, there would be no advantage at all to riding a motorcycle. We stuck around Rexburg for a couple of hours, but you could have ridden to Idaho Falls faster on a bicycle. My son went over to Wyoming and down to Utah through Bear Lake. I headed to Arco and down to Nevada. There was a steady stream of traffic, but the only serious slowdown was at Shoshone where it was backed up about a mile and a quarter. I quickly found an alternate route around that and drove on to Wells NV, at which point I was too worn out to drive further.
Overall we consider the Eclipse trip to be a success and would so it again. But only for a total eclipse, not for even a 90% partial.
