Monday after leaving Washington, DC we traveled to Gettysburg, PA were we are staying for 2 nights. The campground we are staying at is actually on part of the battleground. Monday when we arrived we setup the motorhome and then headed to the Gettysburg Visitor Center to try an determine what we should do for the short time we will be here. I must be honest, I had no idea what happened in Gettysburg other than it was some type of Civil War battle. That is one of the things about this journey is that we don’t plan much in advance (we don’t have much time to really). We figure it out when we get there.

At the visitor center we sat through a “free” 30 minute overview of what the battle was about and what there is to do at the battlegrounds. Since our “sightseeing” budget is pretty tight we had to make some decisions and the fancy 20 minute movie and museum wasn’t going to make the cut at $28 for the 4 of us. So we decided to pickup at 4 hour long movie about the battle of Gettysburg and watch it that night. That way when we toured the battlegrounds we would have some clue of what happened. We also passed on the guided tours.

After visiting the Visitor center we took the kids to the playground for a short period and then came back in to start the Gettysburg movie. I knew if we didn’t start it early I would be out cold and miss the ending.

Tuesday morning we got up and worked until about lunch time. Then made the 1 mile drive to the start of the “Auto Tour” of the battlegrounds. This is a 15 stop free driving tour around the over 1,300 monuments scattered around the battlefield. Seeing the movie really helped as I could better see what happened and where on the battlefield. If I remember correctly there were something like over 50,000 killed or wounded in this battle. They said the smell from decomposing bodies was so bad residence had to stay inside for up to 2 month because the odor was so bad. It is hard to even imagine what it must have been like to be here when this was actually happening.

During our Auto Tour the kids were working on completing the needed paperwork to get their “Junior Ranger” certificates. They worked really hard answering all the questions needed to get this. We also picked up a National Parks Passport for the kids to collect stamps from all the parks we hope to visit over the next year.

This has definitely been a quick stop but we feel we have a good overview of the area and can move on. Tomorrow we leave here and take the short drive over the Lancaster, PA for a 5 night stay in the Dutch Country. I’m pretty excited about this and it should be a good stay. As usual I know nothing about the Dutch Country so it should be educational for all of us.  We will probably try to drive up to Hershey, PA to see if we can get a tour of the Hershey Chocolate plant.

We actually do not have anything planned for our next stop after Lancaster. Our thoughts were to hit Wilmington, DE but there are not a lot of campgrounds in the area. We will try to have something confirmed by the end of this week as we leave Lancaster on Monday. As always, thanks for following us.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Places we've Stayed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.