Those pictures are beautiful Flathead770! 
Can you use a normal camera to capture the eclipse or do you need any more special fulfillments for it?
I'm also curious as to what you're going to back to school to study for.
Thanks! This trip is what inspired me to look more into photography.
Those pictures were all taken with my phone so yes you can take a decent shot of the eclipse, though obviously much more limited then an actual camera or DSLR.
My phone has a "pro" setting that can be accessed by swiping right when taking a picture. From there you want to set the ISO to the lowest value (in my case 100). This setting is basically changing how sensitive the camera is to light. The lower the value the lower the sensitivity. This makes sure that your phone doesn't try to compensate for the dark landscape by auto bumping the ISO up (and as a result would over saturate the eclipse). You could also shoot in HDR mode (High Dynamic Range) that takes 3 shots in quick succession at 3 different exposure levels (low mid high) and averages them out so that the shadows are brighter to show a bit of detail and the highlights are a little less over exposed. The last thing to be aware of is to manually set the focal length to infinity so that the eclipse is in focus. Auto focus has a hard time focusing in low light conditions. I actually had to download a free camera app to set this.
And that's it really. Mostly just 2 settings and it works reasonably well.
As for school, I'm thinking I might take some form of Engineering, mostly towards getting into the renewable energy industry, which would most likely be Civil Engineering. Application deadline is March 1 though so earliest for me to go back would be September 2020.
What would be a perfect day for you?
That's a good question. Probably something camping related, or at least nature related in general. It's too far and few in between daily life for me so it's nice when the only goal for the day is to look at scenery.
What is the longest duration of time you've ever lived in a single home? Conversely, what is the shortest you've lived in a single home? (Not counting vacations and the like.)
I've only ever lived in 3 different homes across 2 different cities in my life so this one is easy. First home was in a trailer court for the first 5 years of my life, then we moved into a more traditional home for about 15 years until I moved to my current place so I could go to University and I've been living here for about 9 years now.
