My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we're off to Iceland for another.

We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.

I don't remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.

Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I'm not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.

For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.

We'll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.