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A family traveling back to Melrose from northern New Hampshire lost cell service for hours and grew concerned about the lack of officials along the traffic jam.

This week, Mark Morgan was among the many Massachusetts residents who made the journey north to witness the solar eclipse within its path of totality. It was an “amazing” experience, he said, but what came after was the opposite: an 11-hour, overnight slog through New Hampshire back to his home in Melrose. 

The journey, beset by lengthy cell service outages and standstill traffic, left Morgan asking serious questions about how prepared officials were for the surge of eclipse viewers. 

After traveling to Tennessee in 2017 to witness the solar eclipse that year and narrowly missing out on being in the path of totality, Morgan said he and his family were “dead set” on witnessing the full force of this year’s spectacle. Morgan and his family have relatives in northern New Hampshire, so they drove up to North Stratford on Sunday. There was no traffic. 

Seeing the total eclipse was “absolutely fantastic,” he said. Morgan expected traffic on the way home, especially with crowds flocking to Lancaster, south of where he and his family viewed the eclipse. 

The family hit the road at 7 p.m., hoping that waiting a few hours would help them evade the worst of the traffic. They were wrong. 

“We thought we were being smart by waiting a little while to let some of the folks come back beforehand, but seemingly everybody else had the same idea,” Morgan said. 

Of course, some traffic was to be expected. Morgan said he anticipated spending five or six hours in the car. On a normal day, the drive from North Stratford to Melrose takes just over three hours. Locals in New Hampshire treated the exodus of eclipse chasers like a parade, he said, setting up lawn chairs on the side of the road, waving and taking photos as the cars headed back south. 

It ultimately took Morgan and his family until 3:30 a.m. just to get past a bottleneck that formed at the juncture of Route 3 and I-93 in Franconia. This portion of the drive normally takes about an hour. It lasted eight-and-a-half for the family. At one point, Morgan said that it took them five hours to travel five miles. 

Technical problems added to the stress. Both Google Maps and Apple Maps showed that, after Lancaster, traffic would be light all the way back down to Massachusetts. 

“What it said on the map was blue, (but it) was wall-to-wall, bumper-to-bumper traffic. The navigation aids started to go kind of wonky and then they just shut down entirely,” Morgan said.

He has made the same drive many times before, and cell service is normally fine. But the family couldn’t make calls, send texts, or access the internet for hours while stuck in traffic. Morgan said he has heard from others who experienced the same thing. He worried about what would have happened if there was an emergency and they needed to call for help. 

“There was no place to stop, that five-hour thing was in the middle of the woods on a hill in New Hampshire. There was no anything,” he said. 

Service returned around 4 a.m., after the family passed the bottleneck in Franconia. 

“In New Hampshire, that should have been a completely foreseeable outcome on the roads up there,” he said. “It became very clear that all that traffic has to  funnel down through Franconia Notch, which is one lane each way.”

Morgan acknowledged that the narrow roads would always have struggled to handle the intense traffic, but said he wished that there was a presence from officials to inform people about the delays or to be ready if someone had an emergency while in traffic. 

“The officials up there should have foreseen that. There were no cops, no state troopers, no signs, there was no one out there in any official capacity that we saw,” he said. 

A Wakefield family had a similarly exhausting all-night trip. They had to wait more than four hours to charge their electric vehicle on the way home from Vermont, even handing out numbered tickets to the hundreds of other drivers waiting their turn, WCVB reported. They arrived home at 4 a.m.

Morgan’s family finally got home around 6 a.m. Morgan immediately started making lunches and preparing for the day as his kids tried to get a bit of sleep before school. Despite the stress and sleep deprivation, Morgan said he and his family do not regret their trip. 

“It was worth it,” he said.