The drive there was a piece of cake.  The drive back was absolutely miserable.  We are talking 3 hours 15 minutes to get there and over 7 hours to get back.  number9XD is still stuck on the road at least 2 hours from home and he actually left before I did but took a different route.  The last I heard he was actually at a full stop on the Western Parkway.

Hopkinsville was prepared to handle the crowd, the rest of the state was absolutely clueless.  Elizabethtown is in complete chaos with Waze showing the interchange ramps between interstates and parkways moving at 1 to 4 miles per hour for over four hours!!!!  Elizabethtown was also the only major bottleneck and traffic backup on the drive down.  

It was nearly 12:30am before I got back to Ohio. I have made that trip a hundred times and I've never seen anything like the traffic tonight.

I escaped a lot of the traffic thanks to interpreting the Waze map, not following their recommended route.  We had been through town earlier in the morning and knew of one pinch point with traffic.  After the totality I was watching traffic while tearing down and loading up the car.  Waze's recommended route was through pinch point, then every road leading to the pinch point started turning red.  As I continued to watch the red kept advancing towards the point, and then everything turned solid red.  Waze still kept recommending that route, yet the road heading east straight out of town showed no traffic.  So we went that way instead.

One bad thing about Waze, when you lose your cell data service, the app no longer gets real-time traffic data.  We got to a small town and Waze recalculated.  The route looked clear so I went with it only to find out that it dumped me in the middle of the gridlock on the Western Parkway.  That really sucked as I was making good time on a mostly clear road before that. 

My drone video of the event.  Street lights start coming on at 8 seconds in.  I was busy with other things and didn't get it up in the air as soon as I wanted but the end of the video shows how bright the normal day would be.  I just slapped music behind it, so feel free to mute it if you want.

We were aiming for Princeton but traffic got apocalyptic and we pulled off at Elizabethtown.  Even though we were only 100 miles or so from totality what we saw was kind of disappointing.

I have never seen traffic like that except maybe when trying to get over the GW Bridge in NY.  Even there though people werent completely ignoring traffic laws and driving in the shoulders and shit.  It was chaos.

If anyone is still thinking they're going to "bug out" when the time comes they're delusional unless they're on motorcycles.

I live just east of E-town and drove SE to Sparta, TN. No traffic on the way down, no traffic on the way back. I caught myself doing 70 in a 55 once or twice on the way back.  The whole world drove to Hopkinsville because they put an X on the map there.  We still had 2:40 of darkness in a half empty church parking lot.

Lol. That looks familiar. Murray State Hoptown campus.

Hell with a pic! Send me a bag of 10 or so!!

Damn I miss those tasty little morsels!! Best drunk food in the universe! Better than any Krystal, White Castle or Waffle House ever DREAMED they could be!!

Love your avatar, old time member!  

Yes it is.  Small but recognizable by those familiar with it.  The new veterinary building is ridiculously huge.