For these eclipse chasers, a 3-hour trip became an 11-hour marathon

This week, Mark Morgan was among many Massachusetts residents who made the trip north to watch the solar eclipse on its path of totality. It was an “incredible” experience, he said, but what followed was the opposite: an 11-hour night driving across New Hampshire to get home to Melrose.

The trip, beset by lengthy cell service outages and standstill traffic, led Morgan to ask serious questions about whether officials were prepared for the influx of eclipse observers.

After traveling to Tennessee in 2017 to witness that year’s solar eclipse and narrowly missing the path of totality, Morgan said he and his family were “determined” to witness the full force of this year’s show. Morgan and his family have relatives in northern New Hampshire, so they traveled to North Stratford on Sunday. There was no traffic.

Seeing the total eclipse was “absolutely fantastic,” he said. Morgan expected traffic on the way home, especially with crowds flocking to Lancaster, south of where he and his family viewed the eclipse.

The family hit the road at 7 p.m., hoping that waiting a few hours would help them escape the worst traffic. They were wrong.

“We thought we were being smart by waiting a little bit to let some people back in first, but apparently everyone had the same idea,” Morgan said.

Of course, traffic was to be expected. Morgan said he planned to spend five or six hours in the car. On a typical day, the drive from North Stratford to Melrose takes just over three hours. New Hampshire residents treated the exodus of eclipse chasers like a parade, he said, setting up lawn chairs on the side of the road, waving and taking photos as cars headed toward South.

It ultimately took Morgan and his family until 3:30 a.m. to overcome a bottleneck that formed at the junction of Route 3 and I-93 in Franconia. This part of the journey normally takes around an hour. It took the family eight and a half hours. At one point, Morgan said it took them five hours to walk five miles.

Technical problems add to the stress. Google Maps and Apple Maps showed that after Lancaster, traffic would be smooth all the way to Massachusetts.

“What was marked on the map was blue, (but it was) wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper traffic. The navigation aids started to get a little wobbly and then they completely shut off,” Morgan said.

He has made the same trip several times before and cell service is working normally. But the family was unable to make calls, send text messages or access the internet for hours while stuck in traffic. Morgan said he has heard of others who have experienced the same thing. He worried about what would have happened if there had been an emergency and they had to call for help.

“There was no place to stop, this five hour thing took place in the middle of the woods on a hill in New Hampshire. There was nothing,” he said.

The service returned around 4 a.m., after the family had overcome the bottleneck in Franconia.

“In New Hampshire, this should have been a completely predictable outcome on the roads there,” he said. “It became very clear that all of this traffic has to go through Franconia Notch, which is one lane in each direction.”

Morgan acknowledged that the narrow roads would always have struggled to handle the heavy traffic, but said he wished authorities had been there to inform people of delays or to be ready if someone had an emergency in the area. traffic.

“The people in charge there should have foreseen this. There were no cops, no state troopers, no signs, there was no one in any official capacity that we saw,” he said.

A family from Wakefield experienced an equally grueling all-night journey. They had to wait more than four hours to charge their electric vehicle on the way back from Vermont, even handing out numbered tickets to the hundreds of other drivers waiting their turn, WCVB reported. They arrived home at 4 a.m.

Morgan’s family finally returned home around 6 a.m. Morgan immediately began packing lunches and planning for the day while her children tried to get some sleep before school. Despite the stress and lack of sleep, Morgan said he and his family don’t regret their trip.

“It was worth it,” he said.