Wednesday, April 16, 2008- Antietam

Julie wanted a place to hike. Scott wanted to see more battlefields and take pictures of monuments. Anna and Emma were ready for anything, so we drove to Antietam National Battlefield today. In stark contrast to all of Gettysburg’s hubbub and crowds, tacky shops and traffic, Antietam is peaceful and quiet. We almost had the park to ourselves.

We went to the Visitors Center first. From there we walked north through the earliest portions of the battlefield and all the way around the North Woods. We walked and walked and walked until the perky little girls were ragged and whiney. We brought a picnic lunch with us that we ate at one of the stops. When we returned to the visitors center, Julie and the girls went to the stone observation tower at the end of the Sunken Road, while Scott walked the length of the road, taking photographs. From there we made our way to Burnside’s Bridge. Julie and Scott had been there before, but Julie had never felt fit enough to make the trek down the hill to Antietam Creek and the bridge itself. Today she made it and still had energy enough to carry Emma back up the hill. Anna and Emma were certainly dragging at this point. We made a short stop at the Antietam National Cemetery, and drove back to Gettysburg.

After Papa John’s brought dinner to our room, Julie started the process of packing our things. Scott just hadn’t had enough walking and hadn’t taken enough pictures of monuments yet, so he walked all the way down to Little Round Top. The three girls met him there in the van.

Earlier this week, a ghost tour had stopped in the parking lot right outside our hotel room. None of us really wanted to hear what the guide was saying then when we had several more nights to sleep here, but she talked for a long time. Since then Anna had wanted to go on a ghost tour. We had a ghost tour on a cassette tape from one of our previous visits that wouldn‘t cost us anything, so we decided to take Anna on that. We drove out to the Peace Light Memorial, where the tour begins. She didn’t even make it through the first story because the sound of the narrator and the music were too spooky.

We hadn’t yet taken one of our traditional night time drives through the battlefield yet, so we drove around Spangler’s Spring and Culp’s Hill, around to the Round Tops, and through Devils Den and the Peach Orchard. We were looking for animals, but only saw a marmalade cat run across the road. Oddly, we’ve seen no deer at all this trip. We think that they must have culled the herd that used to be so plentiful here.