I hadn't really planned where we would go because I had never experienced a total eclipse before. Honestly, I just thought I would drive to a park down in Hopkinsville and watch it. After a little more thought, I realized that it would make a lot of sense to be sure that there were clean public restrooms available and food too. I thought about camping out in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant but I felt that would be wrong since their parking lots are relatively small and we might be impacting their business if others were doing the same. I also considered camping out in a Walmart parking lot since they have much bigger parking lots. But still had the same morale dilemma. So while in our Evansville hotel, I went to the Hopkinsville city website to see what they recommended and they had a link to pay-to-park places like church parking lots. Unfortunately, all of the pay-to-park places were full which really freaked me out. I then went to Google Maps and started looking at nearby towns with less eclipse advertising and that is where I found an outlet mall with public restrooms and several within walking distance restaurants in Eddysville, KY.
Took about an hour and a half to drive to Eddysville from Evansville and were set up in the parking lot of the outlet mall by 7 am. The town of Eddysville had planned to use the outlet mall parking lot for eclipse viewing and charged a reasonable $10 entrance fee as opposed to the $50 fees in Hopkinsville. They even were nice enough to wrap up the parking lot lights so that when the lights came on they wouldn't effect our observations. We were the third car into the parking lot. We set up on the east side of the parking lot just off to the side in a grassy area. Others came from as far as Texas. In fact one car came into the parking lot about 30 minutes before the eclipse from St. Louis, Missouri. They originally planned to watch it in Missouri but the weather turned and they had to drive all day to they eventually found a good location. There were storm clouds north of us and a few clouds to the extreme southwest but there were none in Eddysville. In fact, it was exceedingly hot and humid. It felt like 95 degrees F but as the eclipse progressed it became cooler and quite comfortable. I'm guessing that the temperature decreased by 10-20 degrees F.
I had three video cameras set up. One on my telescope, one to capture my family's reaction, and one to hopefully capture shadow bands. Unfortunately we didn't see any shadow bands and we couldn't figure out how to turn off the flash on the iPhone equipped telescope once it came on at about totality. The iPhone-telescope pictures showing the moon's progression across the sun's surface were pretty good.