Oh cool! Welcome to Charleston!

I'm not going to lie, we are expecting a million visitors that weekend, so things here are going to be freaking INSANE.

Carriage tour is a must if you've never been here, ghost tours are just okay. There is a lot of history in Charleston and you will learn a lot on the carriage tour. One of the cool historic places I like downtown is the Old Exchange Building & Provost Dungeon: http://oldexchange.org

There is some fantastic food here, but you might have trouble getting reservations at this point. Some great places to eat in the area are:

Edmund's Oast, Opal, Husk, Cru Cafe, Poogan's Porch

It's the end of August, so prepare for some hot and humid weather. Beaches are nearby if you want to go sun a little bit. The aquarium here is pretty cool I think.

Check pinballmap.com for all the pins around the area as well, we have a good group here that keeps it pretty updated. Most every restaurant that has pins also has good food. Dog and Duck, Kickin' Chicken, Charleston Sports Pub, the Alley, etc... all good places.

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Oh, also.... beware of lizardmen......

http://fortune.com/2017/08/10/2017-solar-eclipse-south-carolina-lizardmen/

Just put some solar filter material on the video camera, hoping to catch some of the eclipse with it.

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Nobody successfully predicts Charleston weather a week out.

I think Thursday we will have a better idea.

At the moment, it's looking like it might be a little stormy. Thunderstorms come and go here pretty quickly, so even if it does storm I'm hoping for some viewing.

I'm still very hopeful.

Enjoy your first trip to Charleston, don't let some clouds ruin it. Even if it's cloudy, NASA is going to have some great streams and you are still in one of the coolest cities.

Just checking the weather here in Charleston, now they've put up the hourly forecast through Monday at 3pm.

It still looks liked scattered thunderstorms in the area, but thunderstorms here are small and move pretty quickly. It's only a 50% chance of rain which is down from the 60% they were predicting. Hopefully it continues that trend.

EDIT: Looking at a different local station's hourly forecast, they've lowered the chance of rain to 20% at 2pm, which is prior to the full eclipse.

Things might be looking up.

The road from Charleston to Columbia is I-26, and I-95 also dumps into it. It's the main road to get to Charleston aside from 17.

I have no clue how bad that will be, we've never really had this many people in the area. It will probably get a little crazy, best bet is just to keep an eye on waze and see what it says your estimated travel time will be and decide.

Even if there are a few clouds, we've decided we are staying put.

If you want a potentially cool way to watch it, the soccer stadium here is going to be letting people onto the field with some event type stuff going on, and showing the NASA feeds on the huge jumbotron.

http://abcnews4.com/news/charleston-area-events/solar-eclipse-viewing-part-at-musc-health-stadium

It's a good clean stadium with good parking, shares a lot with a software company here.

You'll have great viewing from Isle of Palms I think if the clouds cooperate.

NASA arrived here in Charleston earlier this morning.

Traffic looks like it is still fast moving at this time.

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Hope you guys continue to have a safe drive. Looks like traffic is starting to build south of DC but it sounds like you are already past that. Still looks like clear driving from Richmond to Charleston.

Found this post on imgur interesting about the 1999 eclipse. In former Yugoslavia the government mounted a campaign to warn people about false dangers from the eclipse and that they should stay inside.

http://imgur.com/gallery/SuQtW

Welcome to Charleston!

We are going to setup all the camera gear outside in a bit. I'm going to try to stream on twitch for the first time, so a bunch of non-local friends can watch. I'll post the link here if I get it to work.

Here is one of our camera setups.

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We started out pretty good then got clouded over about 30% into it. This is the only video worth sharing that we got, it was originally around 12 minutes of footage but we sped it up 10x.

We still had a great time. It still was clear enough to really show us how dark it got, and we got a lot of swimming in before the thunder started.

Enjoy your time in Charleston! I get to go back to work tomorrow.