Thursday, April 17, 2008- Hershey

We went to McDonalds this morning where we have been posting our blogs. It was there that we received the sad e-mail that we would not be meeting with Scott’s friend Tricia today. She had a death in the family and had to cancel our plans to meet.

We left Gettysburg anyway, mainly because Julie had worked so hard to pack up the van last night. We went to Hershey where the girls rode the Hershey Chocolate World ride twice and went to the 3-D movie that they have there.

We weren’t in any big rush to get anywhere, so after lunch we went to ZooAmerica, adjacent to Hershey Park. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that our memberships in the Buffalo Zoo got us in free. Anna saw a small lizard that seemed to desperately want to get to her. Emma liked that lizard too. Anna also liked seeing the curled up armadillo peeking out and we all liked the roadrunner that was dashing and flying around its habitat. We got some upclose looks at some alligators and saw quite a few different owls and birds. It's a small little zoo, but the exhibits seem to give you an intimate feeling with the animals.

We continued on to the Bethlehem area but were too late to try to go to the Crayola factory today. We got a room at the Farifield Inn & Suites in Bethlehem. That’s where we’ll settle down for the night now.

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.