I’ve become a little obsessed with the moon in recent years. Hard to say when it started exactly, but perhaps it was enjoying looking at the full moon when we caught it right, bright in the sky, when driving on our many road trips. With a lifetime mostly spent in New York City, watching the moon isn’t an activity that is easy to do or accessible given all the tall buildings, so it was an interest when I saw it, but not something front of mind.
The start may have been seeing a fantastic full moon in Greece when we visited the Poseidon Temple in 2017. Or perhaps when we accidentally hit gold on our trip to France in the summer of 2019. On that trip, we booked an Airbnb in Lyon, which happened to be perched on a hill overlooking the city, and we happened to be there during the full moon, facing the direction of the moon rise, and a partial lunar eclipse occurred one of the nights we were there. We marveled at how reddish the moon looked, how big it was in the sky, and enjoyed watching it go from full to partial and back to full. Photo at the top is the full moon over Lyon on that trip.
But regardless of the start, I definitely enjoy watching the full moon. Since we moved to Jacksonville, FL, it has manifested itself in noting the days each month when the full moon will happen, and making time to visit the beach. Viewing the full moon rise in Jacksonville is definitely touch and go, but we have seen some good ones.
In a sense, this is also the continuation of a theme. In the summer of 2017, we took a road trip to the Midwest to watch the full solar eclipse. In fact, when the spot we picked to watch it, Kansas City, was forecasted to be rainy and cloudy, we drove several hours away, into Nebraska, to find a spot where the skies cleared up enough to watch. Taking road trips to watch an eclipse in now a thing for us!
Albuquerque is the spot we will visit
Now that I’ve established my newfound interest in the moon, and our family interest in eclipses, I can move onto the trip details. We decided that the destination for the lunar eclipse would be Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The first factor in choosing Albuquerque is that this particular lunar eclipse is not visible in the eastern half of the US, so being in New York City or Jacksonville doesn’t help us. The eclipse is only visible from the Mountain time zone and further west. The further west you go, the better the view of the eclipse. In the eastern US, the time of the eclipse is 7:11am, but by then the moon will already have set below the horizon, so not visible. But in Mountain time, the eclipse is at 5:11am and in the west it is 4:11am. Therefore, to see the moon, we would need to be in the Mountain or Western time zone.
The second factor in choosing Albuquerque is that we tried to visit last October, but decided to abort at the last minute when COVID cases started increasing, and New Mexico started to really shut down. We had enjoyed visiting Arizona in 2019 and wanted to continue to experience the western US scenery and high desert. But since we aborted our trip to Albuquerque last year, it was still very high on our list of places to see.
Another advantage of being in New Mexico is that the air is very dry, making it more likely that the sky will be clear enough to see the eclipse. In the Mountain time zone, the full eclipse happens from 5:11 to 5:25am, and then the sunrise is 6:03, so the moon will be very very low on the horizon. Any sort of cloud cover will make that difficult to view, especially given that the sunrise itself is at 5:55am, and the sky will already be getting bright. One thing we’ve learned by watching sunrises and moonrises in Jacksonville is that any sort of cloud cover will make horizon viewing difficult.
Since this would be a driving trip, the final advantage to picking a destination in the Mountain time zone is that it would save at least 1 day of driving in each direction. Albuquerque is already a 3-day drive each way, which is a lot.
While somewhere in Arizona or California might have been more ideal spots to watch the lunar eclipse given the time the eclipse will occur, Albuquerque was a great choice for us because we missed visiting last year, the dry air will make the lunar eclipse near moonset time more likely to view, and it keeps the drive from the east coast to a more reasonable 3 days each way.
Testing the digital nomad lifestyle
This trip will also be a good test of being true digital nomads. The COVID pandemic messed up our plans for traveling over the last 14 months, but since we are untethered from our old corporate careers, our general plan has been that we would spend a good amount of time each year slow traveling, spending a week or more in each place we visit, so that we can build in time to work and to see the sights.
On this trip we will spend a week in each of three different locations, and it will be a really good test to see if we can strike a balance between enjoying ourselves visiting new places, but also being productive in the work we are still doing.
We have tried to structure the trip so that we would travel on the weekend days and be stationary on the weekdays, to facilitate working. On this trip, we will spend a week in Albuquerque, then a week between Santa Fe and Taos, and then a final week in Denver, since Colorado is a place I’ve never been to, but have wanted to visit for a long time (#84 in our list of 100 dream travel destinations).
Watch this space for more. I will report back on how the lunar eclipse viewing went, and we will post more about our travels in Albuquerque, Santa Fe / Taos, and Denver.
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
