A solar eclipse is an eccentric way to organize a vacation calendar, Pamela Paul admits. It means going places you never wanted to go, sometimes at the worst time of year, with no guarantee the clouds will cooperate. She was converted in Casper, Wyoming, in 2017, when the noon sky went dark and a 360-degree halo of daylight ringed the horizon. Birds hushed. Dogs barked and then quieted. People gasped, some with tears on their faces. “I knew at once that not seeing this again was not an option.” On Aug. 12 she was on a cliff outside León, Spain, for her third.
The people on the cliff
Lorraine Whitman Check, 84, a former rocket scientist from the Upper West Side, was there with her 90-year-old husband. It was their fifth. Their first, from a cave in Cappadocia in 2006, made her hyperventilate and him cry. “For me, there is something sacred about the eclipse,” she said. “It’s the face of God I don’t believe in.”
Elliot Borgman, 77, a retired astronomer from Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, was on his 21st, 17 of them successful. His first was Puerto Vallarta in 1991. The clear skies over León made this one almost too easy; he prefers a little cloud anxiety. “It juices the experience.” Two years ago in Buffalo, Paul stood in a park with a crowd pleading with the weather as clouds muted totality. Even so, she writes, they were united in a moment of reverence.
On the way down the cliff she met Alex House, 36, a former airman, and Olivia Walker, 30, a firefighter, from Clearfield, Utah. The moment the corona vanished and the sun re-emerged, he asked whether she had seen the diamond ring. She had. “Do you want to see another one?” He produced one from his pocket. The crowd cheered three times that day: for the engagement, for the end of the eclipse, and for the sunset over the cathedral.
Next year, with prices
| Where | What you get on Aug. 2, 2027 | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Egypt (Luxor) | Totality projected at more than 6 minutes | Nile cruise with Sirius Travel from about $7,300 |
| Strait of Gibraltar | More than 4 minutes from the Rock, Mediterranean below | National Geographic cruise from about $27,000 |
| Tangier, Morocco | High odds of clear skies; the Caves of Hercules after | Hotels filling now |
The moon will be near its closest point to Earth, so the 2027 totality over North Africa is unusually long. Hotels and organized tours are filling fast. The eclipse chasers, whose median age on that cliff appeared to be somewhere north of Medicare, already have their deposits in.
The planning angle
Most travel in a retirement plan is vague: “Europe, sometime.” This one has a date, a place and a price. That makes it the model for how a travel line should be written: a dated withdrawal, sized now, funded from cash set aside a year ahead so that whatever the market does in July 2027 has nothing to say about it. Borgman has done that 21 times. The trick, he says, is that everyone who sees one asks the same question afterward: when is the next one?