East Trip: Gettysburg

 

We don’t have pictures, but on our way to our cousins’ house, we stopped and ate at a Roy Rogers restaurant.  We girls have enjoyed watching Roy Rogers before (and used to play ‘cowboys’..er…girls, and even got cap guns and hats for Christmas one year 😉  )  so it was fun getting to eat at a restaurant named after him.  Several of us girl ordered Philly Cheesesteaks, but like we said in our Philadelphia post, none of them we’ve had have been as good as the ones in Philly.  The Roy Rogers was fun to experience (the fries came in carboard ‘gun holsters’ 😀 )  but the food wasn’t exactly super.  It was about McDonalds quality 😛

 

After staying the night with our cousins, we headed towards Gettysburg.  On the way, we stopped at Wendy’s for lunch and sang our ‘Fugue for Fast Food’ for them at the restaurant 😀

 

When we finally arrived in Gettysburg, we went to the museum gift shop first (of course!) and bought postcards to send (and to paste into our visual journals), as well as pressed pennies (we collected these wherever we went!).  At many places, there were these little ‘passport stamps’ you could put on your postcards, or a little ‘passport book’.  We tried collecting these wherever we went.  While in the gift shop in Gettysburg, there was a place you could not only use the ‘passport stamp’, but also put a postage stamp on them and send them.

So as Jessica and Susannah were stamping away on their postcards, they were both asked if they were the ‘stamp lady’.  They thought they were stamping them to send them 😉  So Susannah and Jessica explained that you could stamp them for fun and the lady said, “I thought maybe you worked here since you seemed to know what you were doing!” 😀  The girls told her it was because we’d been travelling, and using these stamps at lots of places 😀

While we were looking at the little map from the visitor’s center, a lady came up and said, “We love your blog!”  😀  It turns out she had been following our trip progress and we just happened to be at Gettysburg the same day she was 😀  That was fun!    We didn’t think to ask her name, so we referred to her as ‘the lady in the green shirt’ 😉  So if ‘our’ lady-in-the-green-shirt is reading this, we’re waving and saying hello!!!  😀

 

Jessica was taking a picture and had lagged behind everyone else when she heard a lady walk by with her family and say “19 Kids and Counting!”.   No, unfortunately we’re only “9 Kids and Counting”  😀

 

Before actually heading out towards the battlefields, we got a picture with Abe.

 

The sister who doesn’t like Abe (for no particular reason) and the sister who loves Abe 😀

 

Some of the fences along one of the battlefields

 

 

We drove around to different spots of the battlefields (so a lot of the battlefield pictures are taken through the windows).

 

We drove through the area of Pickett’s Charge, where 12,000 Confederate soldiers came and attacked, but the Union soldiers were able to hold their ground on the hill.

 

 

{the battlefield…it’s sobering to think of all the men who died here…}

 

 

 

 

This isn’t a really clear picture (it was taken through the window again!) but this little farmhouse was a ‘hospital’ during part of the war.

 

 

We drove to the cemetery next and saw all the graves of the soldiers who died…

 

 

 

 

Somewhere here was the cannon that opened the battle…we didn’t get to see it, but it was there!

 

 

 

 

An iron fence that separated the old part of the cemetery from the new…

 

 

Some of the headstones had names…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…but many of them were unknown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this approximate area is where Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address…

 

{a closeup of part of the Address}

 

There was also this memorial for Abraham Lincoln…people put pennies all over the top of it…kind of like what we saw in Boston.

 

 

 

{another unknown grave}

 

 

{three unknown soldiers}

 

It’s kind of funny how this picture happened…Bekah was rubbing her eyes because the sunlight was so bright, so it looks like she’s mourning 🙂

 

{an American Holly tree}

 

{pretty scenery}

 

We also saw the graves of some of the soldiers who fought, but survived the Civil War.  Sometimes it is easy to compartmentalize each era, and think that someone from the Civil War wouldn’t have seen the World Wars.  This man lived right up to the time of World War 1.  Another man who’s grave we saw, lived right up to 1929!  Can you imagine all the change that they saw??

 

 

Our next destination was some more friends who lived in Maryland…it was getting kind of dusky and as we passed a field with animals in it.  Charissa exclaimed, “Look!  Sheep!”   Somebody said, “No, Charissa!  Those are cows!” Poor girl had been in the city too long 😉

 

While at our friends house, we caught Isaiah in the bathroom talking to the faucet, “Woo-hoo!  Yoo-hoo! Turn on!”  The poor boy had gotten so used to automatic faucets, he must have forgotten they have handles 😀

 

Our next stop, and next post in this ‘series’, will be about Arlington 😉

 

 

 

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