Thousands of Central Virginia residents donned special glasses to catch a glimpse of a partial solar eclipse on Monday, but some local residents drove hours to experience a total eclipse of the sun.

“I feel like I’m a somewhat changed man,” WINA education analyst Lee Elberson told Charlottesville Right Now in an interview an hour after the eclipse.

Elberson and a group of friends drove about eight hours to watch the eclipse on an elk ranch about 20 miles northeast of Cleveland, Ohio on the Pennsylvania border.

“We chose this spot because we wanted to turn it into a camping trip,” Elberson explained. The group set up on the side of a lake around 2pm to start watching.

“It’s 10 percent, it’s 30 percent, even up to like 95 or percent or even 98 percent, you really can’t look at the sun,” he said. “But it was amazing how as it got to 90 percent, you could feel it getting colder and colder.”

When the eclipse reached 100 percent, the group took off their glasses and soaked up the experience.

“It was really weird,” he said. “It got very quiet, the road noise stopped… and the birds stopped chirping.”

Elberson described seeing a diamond-like ring and seeing seeing coronal firings. The sky turns as dark as night, and Elberson estimated the temperature plummeted by 30 degrees.

“It lasts only a few minutes but in those few minutes, you feel so small but so important at the same time,” he said.

Elberson says the next total eclipse in North America will happen in 20 years, but he learned there’s one happening in Spain in 2026 and his group is already talking about it.

“I could definitely see how when you see one, you say, I want to keep doing this and reproducing it,” he said.