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Traffic was terrible heading towards it. I crossed into the path of totality near the Georgia-South Carolina border only a few minutes before the eclipse began. A couple miles further in, very close to SC, when the sun was almost 50% obscured I pulled over at a gas station. There were at least 100 people in the parking lot all looking at it.
I didn't have the dumb glasses, so I did the pinhole box trick and watched the sun sliver disappear. Totality was weird, you could see some stars, and the sky was purple, pink, and orange. Birds stopped chirping, crickets started up.
While it was total you could look straight at it without anything to protect your eyes. The corona was visible, a gleaming halo around a black disk, it was ghastly in appearance. Where I was there was about 45 seconds of totality, I wasn't far north-east enough for the full duration.
I was really surprised when the first sliver of light came back through by how powerful the little speck of light was, you couldn't look at the tiniest sliver without hurting your eyes. I did see the "waves" on the ground, they looked like the rippling texture of the surface of the sun that you see in those NASA photos of the sun.
I have like an emotional disposition, I teared up a bit when it happened and was kind-of moved by it for the rest of the day.
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