Another case of cautious optimism

When we switched the night of an earlier tour to this night, the weather looked as good as it ever could, and then over the course of the couple days in between, I watched it become progressively worse, yet hold right on the edge of ‘reachable’. With a long drive and a little bit of luck, we might just be okay and into clear skies.

“I feel a lot better now than I did an hour ago, but let’s see.”

In the hours before we’d leave town, the aurora conditions looked pretty bad and satellite imagery of cloud cover was really testing the limits of how far I’d be willing to drive. But as I stopped just shy of my guests a couple minutes before their pick-up, I checked one last time the aurora conditions and weather, and both, within an hour, had improved greatly.

As I met my guests at the end of their driveway, they looked at me, looked up at a cloudy sky, and looked back at me. “I feel a lot better now than I did an hour ago, but let’s see”, I said with a smile on my face.

I was cautiously optimistic. And after a shorter then feared expected drive, we arrived under a clearing sky with faint traces of the aurora that grew steadily into a breathtaking show.

And we were home before 3am - proof that miracles really do exist.