Update 2022: hacked this wall of text into paragraphs. Text itself unchanged.
(This is the original mailout that I sent to a number of people on 16-8-1999.)
Cheap newsrags called it the eclipse mania: a good-sized part of the Dutch population travelling to Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Germany and even Hungary to catch a total eclipse, while the less interested stayed in Holland for a 94 to 97 percent eclipse, all armed with camera, flashlight and the special eye-protecting mylar sun-filter glasses, i.e., a cardboard frame with two bits of black foil in it. Yours truly bought one of these and attended an informative little lecture from which came the knowledge that the global rise in temperature has to do with sunspots, checked the map, heard that the weather was likely to be cloudy, especially in the south of England (which would be sinking under the weight of the American tourists) and opted for the southmost part of Europe that my budget would allow for: Luxemburg.
The ticket bought, I decided to leave late and sleep in Luxembourg (capital of Luxemburg, surprise hey?) somewhere on the pile of eclipsewatchers that would have gathered already, rather than spend the night hanging around Utrecht Central pretending to be one of the beggars (brr) to leave on the earliest train in the morning, be caught in the crush and still come too late and miss it all. (Later I found out I could have left even later and done my sleeping on the train. But one always discovers these things later.) I left Holland at Maastricht, its most southern tip, changed trains at two bare, unlikely-looking stations in Belgium called Liege-Guillemins and Namur, and had the train almost to myself until the last stretch across the border of Luxemburg, where the passengers were jam-packed and I was in the space between two carriages with about ten other people; and you know how it is, when ten people are tightly packed into a small space, then four of them will want a smoke.
At last I fell out of the train at Luxembourg, the first decent station I had seen, smallish, but clean and well stocked with shops and so well-warmed that we hotel-less eclipsewatchers quite comfortably curled up on its hard stony floor, although I woke up three hours later with severe rump-ache. At six I started to roam around a little, trying to decipher the lettering on PIN card and ticket vending machines, find a public lavatory :) and pick the spot where I would be undergoing the mystic experience of the solar eclipse: a sun diminishing into a sickle, a final burst of light and then a black circle surrounded by a halo, and all its side-effects: night at noon, the wind rising, the birds falling silent. And I decided this would not be in the city of Luxembourg itself.
So I got me a one-day touring ticket for Luxemburg. Or rather, I bought a "return ticket" from any destination to any destination within Luxemburg for the duration of the day, as I understood it. Not that this is a big thing, since Luxemburg fits about five times in Holland, i.e. it is very, very small, but in the course of my station-hopping I got to see an interesting assortment of train lavatory models, and the trains themselves were generally what the Dutch would consider first class. (In fact the only difference between first class and second class in these trains was a lighter shade of upholstery <shrug>.) Again, I had the trains to myself - where were all the other eclipsewatchers? - and I walked in virtual solitude around Noertzange and Rumelange, two Alpine-looking towns with magnificent houses spaced far apart, on which I used up half a camera roll killing time before the eclipse; a time in which the blanket of clouds thickened and some rain fell. I considered buying a bus ticket to France just over the border, but it was getting so late that I didn't want to risk it.(Later I found it would have been a waste of money, as the only place with a good view of the eclipse had been Arlon in Belgium just to the North. Frustratingly enough, that was on the route I'd come by; now if only I'd gotten off the train a stop earlier!!)
Anyway, I found myself a very quiet spot near the railroad in an already very quiet town and sat on a wide stone parapet using my camera viewer as a mirror to tell when the sun was coming out. The clouds parted a little and a quick risky glimpse upward showed me the sun with just a nibble out of it at ten past eleven. I put on my solar eclipse glasses and saw - nothing, because the sun was behind the clouds again and the glasses keep out all but the brightest light. Every so often a flash in the camera viewer told me I could put them on again, and if I looked straight up I could see, against a black background, a yellowy globe with an increasingly big bite out of it; no crescent shadows on the ground, it was too overclouded.
What happened on the moment of the eclipse itself you can guess. In the far past when China was reigned by emperors, one of these emperors had his astrologers beheaded for failing to forecast that the sun would be "eaten by a dragon". Well, at the clock of twelve when the sun was a thickish sliver, it was indeed eaten by a dragon, or so the two bands of cloud rolling before it appeared; they made a perfect beaky dragon's head, while the other bands of cloud rolling in on either side were very convincing as leathery wings. In short, I got to see nothing of the whole eclipse, and the inhabitants of the house opposite to my stony perch said I should go watch it on TV; obviously they didn't realize I wasn't a native, probably because I didn't have a rucksack, a rucksacked partner and a string of kids behind me. But I wanted to be out in the open (and was also hoping for a tear in the clouds) and so at least experienced what must be the eeriest aspect of the total eclipse: the darkening.
One colleague at work had shrugged off the eclipse with "I can see the sun disappear every day". But an eclipse is nothing like that, unless you live at the equator. One moment, it's day. (Make that grey cloudy day.) The next, it seems as if you're in a huge dome-shaped room with one of those bulbs that dim when you turn them, and someone's dimming the bulb. Gradually yet swiftly, the sky does not so much darken as lose light, and all the surroundings sink into a deep twilight. The wind didn't rise, probably because the day had been cold and windy to start with, and if anything the birds redoubled their singing. (As light returned it became quieter again, so I must have been in a high nightbird density area.)
What probably makes the darkening during an eclipse so eerie is that it happens too slowly for the human eye to follow, yet too quickly for the eye to adjust; the eye is constantly left disoriented. After a while the twilight began to lessen, and with a sinking feeling I realized that it was over, and, when I thought daylight had returned, hoisted my bag on my back to leave, but still the eclipse had cheated me, because the sky became several shades lighter after that, and on the way to the train I caught a sickle of sun being uncovered again, which I quickly took a picture of, and if the picture develops well (is it possible to take a picture of the sun with an ordinary camera?) I'll scan it and put it up. And that was my eclipse and last moment of joy before a gruelling journey back home, where I caught the midnight BBC broadcast of the eclipse and so saw it anyway.
A number of non-eclipse-related comments here. Firstly, despite being smaller than Holland, Luxemburg offers much more space to its inhabitants and a more beautiful architecture. It looks very Swiss (says I who have never been in Switzerland) and as in Switzerland, the natives have been subjected to French and German and speak a mishmash of the two called "Letzebuergs" in which "bank" becomes "Spuerkeess", the meaning of which can be discovered from the related German "Sparkasse". A street sign can read "Rue des pres" and, just under that in smaller print, its literal translation "Wisenstrooss". The Letzeburgers don't print everything double, though; they give one half of the message in French and the rest in Letzebuergs, and it's up to the tourist to figure it out and know when to respond in French and when in German. Nevertheless, even with the botched eclipse, Luxemburg had been worth the visit.
Secondly, the Belgian trains are worthless. The Belgian railroad company had apparently been "unprepared" for the eclipse (??? And they had special "eclipse trains" riding!) and I got off lucky with a mere thirty to forty minutes delay stuffed in a train with tired disappointed eclipsewatchers and their even tireder and more disappointed progeny until at last I could kiss the floor of a Dutch train again. ("Back on the home turf!" I thought, as if our trains are much better; I'd had the same half-hour delay in Utrecht the previous day, almost missing the connection to Lieges.)
Thirdly, and you probably saw this one coming: would people who bring their kids along please consider deep-freezing them for transport in a cryogenic unit or stuffing them in cat-carriers??!! There was hardly a child in the train that wasn't squalling or yakking or making a nuisance of itself, while the parents tiredly repeated "Sit down, I'm not telling you again" and one particularly obnoxious sprat started mooing at me, but at least I had the satisfaction of "accidentally" elbowing him in the ribs when I got off the train; for the rest I had to suffer in silence, and this made up much of my disappointment at the end of what was otherwise a fairly interesting day.
So that's the last eclipse over my part of the world for a while. The next is in..? 2035? which is probably beyond my lifetime. The next one in two years is over Zimbabwe. No clouds there, I'll bet! I'm strongly considering going. After all, I've never been to Africa before...
(PS. I didn't go to Africa because I was skint as usual and would have had to book a hotel room 3 years in advance anyway.)