I organized a trip for some of us from the Des Moines Astronomical Society to travel to Manitoba to view the solar eclipse. It was within reach by car, and 2 carloads were headed there (I believe there were about 6 of us. My friend Randy Ball was among them and he drove one car and I drove another. I contacted a visitors bureau and arranged for us to have a place to stay near Lake Winnipeg at Arborg. When we were in Winnipeg we stopped at the airport to check in at the weather desk to see what the outlook was like, and due to clouds we decided to head west instead of going to our scheduled site as the clouds would be clearing from this direction. We pulled into a farm house near Brandon, Manitoba to ask if we could set up there. They did allow us to do so. They were somewhat elderly. We told them they could watch with us but because they had seen on TV news that they should NOT look at the Sun. We could not convince them that it was OK to do so during totality, and back then there were NO eclipse glasses. This trip was 1344kms (835 miles) each way. On the way back home we saw in the rear view mirrors an aurora while traveling through North Dakota.