Last weeke we visited my brother and his wife in Aller, an area in the mountains of Asturias. I had visited for the first time last year, when I met up with some of my siblings in the nearest city, which si Gijón, but I had not seen the countriside, and it was John’s first time in the region. We ate fabada, cachopo, picadillo, drank sidra, and hung out while trying to keep cool, and on the last day had a nice wander along the beach in Gijón itself and stumbled across a Roman thermal baths museum.

We chose the dates in order to see the eclipse, and almost managed it. Sadly, it turns out that small mountain villages might not be great at organizing themselves for once-in-several-decades astronomical events, and basically they did not run nearly enough buses to the official viewing spot. We drove up to the nearest accessible bit of mountainside and joined a couple dozen locals watching the sun get slowly swallowed up, all of us running towards higher ground as it neared totality while simultaneously disappearing behind a peak in the last minute or so. The weird twilight of totality was still pretty cool, but I’ll admit that the screaming teenagers sharing the mountain did take a tiny bit of the majestic out of the experience.

Still, the fortunate thing is there is another one next year, this time in the south of Spain, so we will hopefully get another shot at it.