A while back I decided that a good way to spend the day before my 40th birthday was viewing the last total solar eclipse of the millennium (for you millennium nitpickers, there's no eclipse in 2000, so the 1999 eclipse is unambiguously the last eclipse of the millennium :-)
After looking over the eclipse path and various weather predictions, it looked like the best compromise between comfort, safety, and decent viewing weather would be found in Turkey. Given my inexperience with international travel, and potential language problems, I decided it would be a good idea to hook up with a tour company. With that goal in mind, I started some serious web surfing. One of the many search results was Explorers Tours, a tour company based in England that specialized in (among other things) astronomical event tours. Their prices were quite good, and the prospect of traipsing around Turkey with a bunch of Brits seemed preferable to traipsing around Turkey with a bunch of Yanks, so I decided to join up with their six-day tour.
One advantage of going with a British-based tour company was that it gave me an opportunity to combine the eclipse trip with some sightseeing around England (and a few nearby places). My partner in crime for the expedition would be Bonnie Petheram (our principal photographer and logistics expert, who skillfully arranged travel and accommodations for the non-Turkey parts of the trip), and we managed to talk Bena Currin into accompanying us for the whole trip, and Castor Fu tagged along for the Turkey tour.
The first part of the journey was a transcontinental flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, then an overnight transatlantic flight from there to Gatwick. Our time before the Turkey trip commenced was very limited, so limited, in fact, that a couple of hours after getting to our London hotel, we dragged our jetlagged selves out to Salisbury and Stonehenge (it was literally the only day we could fit it in!).
Last updated 7/27/2000 by Jean Richter, richter@eecs.Berkeley.EDU