Gettysburg & Home- Wednesday, March 23, 2016

We got a roll-away bed for the room last night, so we probably all got a better night's sleep.  Six "people" in two beds (counting the dogs) was a bit much.  Actually the dogs have been very well behaved on this trip. Partly that's because we bought Schnitzel a new "bark collar" before we left West Seneca.   It's also true that they've been too tired to cause much problem.  After our trek up Big Round Top and all over the place yesterday, when we finally got back to the hotel room they just flopped down and refused to move.   Noodles looked like he was in a coma.


We were probably going to stay in Gettysburg until Thursday,  but now we've got to deal with the car.  The car still wasn't starting.  It was giving us a number of messages including that it was overeheating-- but of course we haven't driven it since yesterday now.  Worse, the engine wasn't turning over at all, and we could not get it started.  Julie called for a truck to come and pick the car up and she went with it to the Ford dealership in Chambersburg.   (We assume they took the Chambersburg Road to get there.).   They unhooked the battery, cleared out the computer, and were able to get the car started again, but after working on the car for something like two hours, they were unable to say what had caused the problem.

Meanwhile, the girls, the dogs and Scott were waiting in the hotel room.  Since we were adjacent to the battlefield, Scott decided to take a walk, and ended up walking to the Pennsylvania Monument, which he climbed up into to admire the view of the Pickett's Charge area.  The weather was warmer than yesterday, though overcast now.  It was supposed to get up into the high sixties.  After returning to the room, Scott, the girls and the dogs took a short walk down Steinwehr Avenue and did a little bit of shopping.

When Julie returned with the car, it was almost noon.  We kept it running, packed up and sadly started the drive home.  Since we couldn't be sure that we'd be able to start the car again, we basically left it running until we got home.  There was one point when we took a pit stop at the "Country Cupboard" in Lewisburg when Scott accidentally turned the car off out of habit, but everyone yelled and he quickly turned it back on again.  He said he was scared it wouldn't turn on but he was even more scared of what Julie might do to him if it didn't.  So we made it back to West Seneca, where it was about 40 degrees cooler and much sadder than we had been in Gettysburg.  We don't know what we're going to do about the car, but Julie's talking about getting a new one of some kind.

While we were away, we were watching Uncle Brian and Aunt Jenny's Facebook pages to see posts of their pictures from Amsterdam.  We didn't know it at the time, but they had made a side-trip to Belgium and an hour before yesterday's terror attack they were within a mile of the site.   We hear that they had a long time getting back to Amsterdam that night, but otherwise are fine.