Finally Made It To SC - 03 Mar 2026

Robin and I left Detroit yesterday morning (Monday) at 6:15 am to drive to Georgetown, SC to visit Jack and Janet Volker for the week. Our plan was to drive to WV, stay the night, then drive the remaining distance to SC on Tuesday. Things didn't quite work out as we'd expected...

We left the house early under clear skies and mild temperatures. Driving I-75 S through Ohio we reached Findlay and saw the first "unfrozen" ponds. We then took US-23 S to I-71 S through Columbus, and that's where trouble ensued. Just north of Columbus an overnight "blizzard" dumped 2" of snow and ice on the road so traffic slowed to a crawl (20mph) for over an hour. A look at the weather map showed a major ice/rain storm extending east to WV that we were just entering. Had we stayed on I-71 we'd be driving in the storm for the next 6 hours. 

We decided to jump back on I-75 and take it south through KY into TN and NC and stay the night in Asheville. The drive through KY was entirely during a downpour that hammered us the entire time. The outside temperature was 0ºC so the risk of freezing rain was high. We managed to make it into TN just as the rain subsided, but then got stuck in a parking lot as I-75 S was closed for about 20 miles.

We managed to drive back roads that paralleled the highway and get back on down the road, but this put us another couple of hours behind. The remaining drive through TN was relatively uneventful, but we'd make it as far as Newport, TN at 5 pm and stay at a Best Western for the night. We'd still have another 6 hours to drive tomorrow.

Our evening stay was pleasant, and we had dinner at Ruby Tuesdays next door to the hotel. Checking the forecast showed that a full Lunar Eclipse was expected tomorrow morning between 3 - 6 am. I was too tired to set up the Seestar S50 to record the eclipse, but hoped to see it when we got up. At 5:30 am I was up and saw the full eclipse from our balcony. Eurasian Collared-Dove and Northern Mockingbird were nice "first" birds of the trip.

We were back on the road at 6:30 am after a quick breakfast at Waffle House. We were hoping to pick up a coffee at Starbucks, but Waze took us to a location that didn't exist. So we backed up and headed back toward the hotel to another coffee shop nearby, but couldn't find it, either. So we headed back south on I-75 toward NC.

Construction in the mountains had us driving 1-lane for an hour until we reached Asheville, NC. There, we needed to hop on US-26 E toward SC but the highway was a parking lot. We got stuck on the on-ramp for 45 min. and never moved an inch. With traffic not moving we drove across the field back to the main road and followed traffic at 2mph for the next 30 minutes before we could get back on US-26. But, when we did we had smooth driving the rest of the way. The final 2 hours of driving through SC to Georgetown was all back roads, and I needed the quiet and serenity to calm my nerves. We arrived at their house just after 2:30 pm and I was ready for a nap. 

I was hoping to set the telescopes up for a night of imaging from their balcony as the dark skies here in Debordieu are rated at Bortle 4. I set the scopes up and ran calibrations as we went to dinner in Georgetown. Unfortunately, clouds moved in after dark and killed any chance of imaging. The only clear skies were on the horizon where a full moon was rising over the ocean. 

Time to call it a night. Tomorrow Jack, Janet, Ken Davis and I would drive to Huntington Beach State Park and walk the North Beach to the Jetty to look for Seaside Sparrows.