The above image shows the route we followed.  The green flags were the path of the center line of the eclipse.  The blue flags were the edge, where there is just the briefest moment of totality.  Leaving from Washington DC Dulles airport on 8/4/26, we arrived at the Madrid (MAD) airport on 8/5.  We then spent the night there, and then move in a counter-clockwise loop around the country.  Each stop will be two nights.  We arrived on 8/11 at Valladolid, the day before the Solar Eclipse.  Although we were already in the zone of totality (duration 1:26 there), we planned to drive North to the center line on the day of the eclipse for a 20 seconds longer show in Osorno.  Since it occurred at the end of the day, we will have the whole day to do that drive.  The big lesson from past eclipses is that the traffic jam will not be before the eclipse, but afterwards.  In normal traffic, our hotel was one hour from the center line.

Our choice to the center line is either Osorno (red marker) or Burgos.

For eclipse day, I picked Osorno for Plan A.  To check visibility with such a low angle, I decided to do a site survey using only Internet resources.  The first thing to do was to find out at what angle the Sun would be during the eclipse.

Information from timeanddate.com for Osorno during the 2026 eclipse.

I went to Osorno on Google Maps, and picked a spot at the northern edge of the town to view the eclipse.  I pulled that spot up on photoephemeris.com (TPE), and could tell where the Sun would be in azimuth (angle from North).

From TPE, and shows the angle of the Sun.
This is the lower ray on the left of the red marker.
That is the angle of 282 degrees from the timeanddate data.

With the above info, I went back into Google Maps, and matched up the street angles with the one from TPE.  I then found a landmark that matches the angle. This object was a high voltage tower (left blue marker below).

The ray from 'view location' to 'tower 1' matches the
angle from TPE. 

Although we intended to see the eclipse on our own from the blue marker above, we ended up outside the white pavilion on the right in the above image.  There we met a delightful group and it was a special viewing.  See Facebook album for the images.

I dropped into Streetview (Google Maps) and could see the following image at the blue marker.

Streetview of the previous image.  Note the three story building
in the right half I call 'the farm house'.  Red dot marks where
the Sun will be.

From the Google Maps measurement tool, I could tell that the distance to the three-story white farm house above is 1,217'.  A 8.7 degree angle that distance would have an elevation of 186' (=1217 x tan[8.7]).  I would estimate the farm house to be 25' tall.  So the elevation of the Sun is 7x that of the farm house.  In addition, from Maps again, I can tell the difference in height between the two blue markers to be only about one dozen feet (so the terrain in that area is essentially flat and level).  So that puts the position of the Sun to be about the red dot in the image above, well clear of any structures.

The Photo Album continues on Facebook. 
Click on "Feed View" for sorting in order and captions. 
Here are some select images below.

In early 2025, I started to look into airline tickets.  We wanted to try the lie-flat seats on the 777, and United featured those.  We also wanted to try the regular first class seats to see how they compared.  We would fly to Spain with the lie-flat "Polaris" seats (as it was an overnight flight), and use the first class seats on the way back (during the day).  I made a straw-man reservation for tickets on flights that would be one year before the eclipse and tracked the prices (green curve below).  They were in the $6k range for two people, with prices gradually going up as the August 2025 date approached.  About a month before the flight, the price dropped to about $5k for a few weeks.  I hoped to purchase our tickets in this dip.

About 11 months before August 2026, United's reservation system allowed booking, and the price started at about $8k (red curve).  As the months went by, the price went up as did the straw-man, but the profile was different.  At some point, the price hit $13k for two, and that is something the straw-man never did.  I decided to do another check of options and found out that there was Polaris service to Lisbon, and then on to Madrid, and the price was $6.2k.  Pretty low compared to the direct to Madrid, so I decided to pull the trigger and purchased them.  I continued to track prices of the direct, and it would swing up and down, but never below $10k.  At some point just before the start of travel in August 2026, it went as high as $22k.  So I felt pretty good about the price we paid.  The highest the one-stop went was about $8.2k

The critical hotel booking were the days before and after the eclipse.
These were at the beautiful AC Hotel Palacio de Santa Ana.

In 2025, I started to check hotel availability on the Marriott site.  A place near the center of the country and in the path of totality was preferred.  The former due to weather statistics.  As soon as reservations opened up (Sept 2025), I was able to make a booking for two nights at the AC Hotel Palacio de Santa Ana.  Little did I know then that it would be the most luxurious location of the trip.  Once this booking was locked in, I made the adjacent days' reservations going backwards in time, and filled in the planned route.  One nice part is that 9 of 10 days were paid for by my Marriott points, including the Palacio.

On eclipse morning we headed North to the center line and the town of Osorno.  We had passed through the town the day before, and had scouted some locations (I recognized the road that I scouted in the Streetview images).  Some streets were closed on eclipse day, but we managed to find a spot on the road I wanted.  We then walked into town and participated in the activites.  Those were the lectures in the town hall (in Spanish), and the pallea that they cooked on location.

Totality image by Nikola Marchev.

The unusual part of this eclipse was the continuous bright red prominence in the 9 o'clock position, and the smaller than normal corona in the 7 o'clock area.  These distinctive features will make images taken from this solar eclipse very recognizable.

While driving around in Spain we would see many beautiful
sun flower fields.  On our departure from Osorno, and
before the Solar Eclipse ended, we snapped this image.


The set of four glasses we now have from each of the eclipses.

In the end, we had a really great trip.  We did not get sick, did not lose or have anything stolen, no mechanical breakdowns, did not get lost, did not get any cancelled reservations (phew, major stress point).  The Spanish drivers were quite good in general.  They usually signal, keep the left lane for passing only (real important to me), enjoyed the first class airline seats, met some great people, had some amazing food, saw some beautiful sights, and above all, had an amazing and memorable solar eclipse.