Gettysburg- Tuesday, April 6, 2021

 

     They say that no plans survive contact with the enemy.  We didn’t have an enemy against us, but our plans certainly didn’t last long.  We sat around last night and decided that we would start at the National Park’s Visitor Center because Emma and Scott like the store there.  We would then spend the morning shopping along Steinwehr Avenue at in the downtown square of Gettysburg.  We’d see what time was left after that.  Just as we ended up formulating that plan, Julie suggested that Scott could walk on the battlefield in the early morning hours first, during that time between when he wakes up and when the Visitor Center opens. 

     Scott had a pretty restless night, but was up and ready to go by 7:00.  He wanted to use the GoPro camera to record a few walks on the battlefield that he could then play when he’s walking on the treadmill on rainy and cold days.   Before he left, he told Julie to meet him at Little Round Top at 8:30. Then he could get a ride back, shower, have breakfast and be ready for the day.

     The start of the walk seemed to go fine.  Scott had the GoPro strapped to his head and headphones to listen to Civil War music as he went.  He started on East Cemetery Hill, where the sun was rising dramatically behind the equestrian monuments there.  He walked through the National Cemetery and then down the main Union line on Cemetery Ridge.  He felt like maybe it was a bad sign when a black cat crossed in front of him, near the Weikert House.   He got to Little Round Top and went all the way to the 20^th Maine monument, on the extreme Union left.  He was a little disappointed then because when he went to shut off the GoPro, he saw that the battery had already died.  He started with a full charge, but he had no idea how long it was supposed to last and when exactly on the walk it had stopped.  Still, as he returned to the parking lot at the summit of Little Round Top, he asked a passer-by what the time was and learned it was 8:32.  Perfect, he thought and waited for Julie to show up to take him back.

     The problem was that there was only one set of car keys with us, and Scott had them.  Julie was left without a way to get to Little Round Top and since Scott doesn’t carry a phone, she had no way to tell him what the problem was.   Not having much choice, she put Abby in the stroller and started her own walk to find Scott.  She left the hotel shortly after 8:00, turned right out of the parking lot, cut through the Visitor’s Center (and learned they are closed on Tuesdays anyway), crossed out to the Pennsylvania Monument and made her way south toward the Round Tops.  Meanwhile, Scott was left puzzled and alone at Little Round Top.  Other then a few quick peeks on the scenic side of the hill, he felt like he had to stay on the parking lot side in order to see Julie when she came.  It was approaching 10:00 when Scott finally decided to start walking back.  As he headed down the northern slope, he saw Julie waving to him at the intersection, with Abby in the stroller.  She explained what had happened and how she had to walk.  Now her hip was hurting her.  Scott said he should probably walk on ahead and return to the hotel to get the car while Julie and the baby came back at a slower pace.  We would rendezvous at the Pennsylvania monument.  By the time Scott got to the hotel it was after 11:00.  He got the car and met Julie and Abby, picked them up and returned.  By that time, Scott really wanted breakfast and a shower, and our whole morning of shopping was lost.   Scott knew it was his fault for taking the keys, but he did point out that the walks would have been a lot shorter if we had stayed on the Steinwehr Avenue side of the Cemetery Hill instead of the Baltimore Pike side.   And Julie had said that she wanted to take a hike on the battlefield sometime this week.  She just didn’t realize it was going to be this morning.

     After Scott had gotten refreshed, we got Emma to join us and we went to the Lincoln Diner for lunch.  Service was a little slow, and Abby wasn’t very patient.  We sat ourselves in the back because she was a little loud.  After lunch, we needed another pitstop at the hotel.  We had learned that our stop at the Visitor Center bookstore had to be postponed until Thursday.   We decided to go to the Outlet Shops, which are on Baltimore Road, just past our hotel.  It was something that Julie wanted to do sometime this week anyway.  We spent the better part of the afternoon there.  The girls each got some things, since they were outlet prices and there is no sales tax on clothes in Pennsylvania.  We won’t need to list everything here, but one of the more notable articles that they bought was a “Dogs of War” t-shirt for Abby.  It’s pink, but has the same design as her dad’s, and shows the two dogs that are sculpted on Union monuments here.  Part of the proceeds from the shirts goes to the local SPCA.  Abby’s also been practicing holding pens to scribble on placemats and receipts (along with her own legs and clothes), so we got her two Disney coloring books, one that came with crayons.

     Julie spoke to Anna on the phone while we were at the Outlets.  She wanted to know when her shopping trip was going to be.  Actually, we got both her and Noah something here today, but we won’t go into details on the off chance that they read the blog.  Anna is watching the dachshunds while we are gone.  She could have stayed at our house, but she took them to be with Noah and Winfield at her apartment.  She sounds like she’s a little frustrated with them already.  She also has to come back to our house each day to feed the Chilly, Emma’s chinchilla.

    After we spent the afternoon at the Outlets, we came back to the hotel.   We then ordered Tommy’s Pizza.  It is one of Scott’s favorites, and is a popular local place here in Gettysburg.  We used their drive-through pick-up window and brought the pizza and wings back to the hotel.  Scott hasn’t had much pizza at all since last August, but he was determined to enjoy eating it tonight.

     During our dinner break, Scott had a chance to check the video that he had taken on the walk this morning.  It turned out to be about 50 minutes long, but missed the last 15 minutes or so.  Scott decided that he wanted the rest of that footage for his treadmill journeys, so even though the light was going to be very different, he had Julie and the girls drop him off around Sedgewick’s statue and the 2^nd Rhode Island’s monument.  It was just a short distance from where Julie and Scott had found each other this morning.  Scott walked the last little bit up Little Round Top again.  This time, unlike this morning, there were lots of people at the summit of the hill.  They had gathered to see the sunset there, and it reminded Scott of December 31, 1999, when he and Julie had watched the last sunset of the millennium there.  Scott finished off the walk and the video and Julie and the girls showed up just moments after the sun went down over the South Mountains. 

     Emma wanted to take a ghost tour, but we decided not to do the walking group tours.  Instead, Scott had digitized the old cassette tape that we used to use to drive around the battlefield. It is called Ghosts of Gettysburg by Mark Nesbitt, who is Gettysburg’s self-appointed expert on supernatural happenings on the battlefield and in the surrounding area.  We had a little trouble following the directions to begin with, but we eventually found our way out to MacPherson’s Ridge where Scott and Emma climbed the small tower in the dark to overlook “Iverson’s Pits.”  (Julie was changing Abby’s foul diaper, but probably wouldn’t have climbed the tower anyway.)  We had a few stops on the Lutheran Seminary campus.  Emma was most creeped out by the story of the poltergeist that was supposed to have come from the man who was buried alive under a pile of corpses in the house out by Lee’s headquarters.  Scott was most bothered by the story of the apparition in the Lutheran Seminary dorms, but was still puzzled as to why the author felt it was necessary to imply that it was the ghost of General John Reynolds.  There didn’t seem to be anything in the story to connect the ghost to him.   We then followed the tour down Seminary Ridge and the main Confederate battleline.  We had a stop at the Virginia monument with Robert E. Lee’s statue.  The story told there and some of the stories at the Eisenhower farm had to do with the reenactors who were there for the filming of the movie Gettysburg.  Anyway, we got through the first side of the “tape” and it was after 9:00.  We figured we probably weren’t going to finish the second side so we saved that for tomorrow and went back to the hotel, though Scott and Emma did make a supply run to Sheetz before coming in.

     In spite of the fact that our plans for the start of the day went awry, Julie still declared it to be “a great day.”