My wife and I are just back from Spain where the primary purpose of our trip was to observe the predicted Leonid peak. We chose a site 30 miles North of Almeria in the Sierra of Los Filabres because it offered the best hopes for clear skies (the area being essentially a desert) and was far away from any existing light pollution. Our observing site was 800 m high, and not very far from the the German-Spanish Astronomical Center at Calar Alto (we did not drive all the way to the observatory because of the extremely cold weather Europe was experiencing at the time).
We were rewarded by crisp skies all night long (limiting magnitude around 6.4 all night) and started observations around 0:20 UT. The rate of meteors observed increased gradually and at 1:40 it was no longer possible to record individual meteors. We started to bin them in counts of 5, then 10 's and later 15's. It was becoming overwhelming and it took all our resolve to continue recording the rate. Most meteors were in the +2 - +4 magnitude range, with only a handful of fireballs recorded during the night - a sharp contrast to last year's show. The peak meteor rate was recorded between 2:02 and 2:05 where I recorded 22 meteors/min, corresponding to a ZHR of approximately 2500. The rate stayed over 18/min from 1:54 to 2:12. The meteors seemed to come in clusters, and we would often see a salvo of 3 or 4 shooting simultaneously across the same part of the sky.
The experience of seeing so many meteors was unlike anything I had seen in my life - even more awe-inspiring than a total solar eclipse. After 2:15 the rate started to gradually come down but stayed high thorough the night. Just before dawn I was still counting 1.5 meteors / min. My own count for the night was 1175 Leonids and 13 Taurids!
Palo Alto, CA