Gettysburg - Part Une

We're not in Kansas any more.

It’s amazing to me, how a drive of 3.5 hours can take you to an entirely different world. But that, dear readers is the truth of what happened to my mom, my Ron, and myself as we went to Gettysburg, PA last weekend or the weekend before or something....

We left on a Friday afternoon for the drive and we took our handy-dandy GPS along because she knew the way. My mom drove (THE ENTIRE WEEKEND despite offers of reprieve). The ride up was fairly smooth with route 78 being the exception (as usual). It took us about 3.5 hours to get to our hotel in Gettysburg, PA.

First a few reflections on the town:

I was very surprised that for all its fame, Gettysburg is truly a sleepy little town. It's got a population of about 7,000 people, which is not a far cry from its 1863 pop of just over 2,000. That is not a lot of growth in 150 years! The economy of the place appears to be strictly based on tourism and the enterprising townsfolk (yes they're townsfolk) have fully capitalized on that bloody battle so many years ago. We've got Pickett's Buffet, American History Bookshop, and about 6 million Civil War Memorabilia Shops. (we saw about 1/3rd of them hehe)

So when we arrived we quickly checked into our hotel which was really nice. The beds were as comfy as what we have at home! We quickly made a mess of the room and then headed off to our first event. A HAUNTED TRAIL RIDE WOOOOOOOOOOO!

This was a silly, silly ride, but the sad part is that it had all the potential in the world of being a great night of fun. First it was on an old train (I think it was 80-something years old) then it had the fortune to be a very dark, cold and stormy night! What luck! Lastly it was riding right THROUGH the creepy, foggy, blood-soaked (not literally) battlefield of Gettysburg!!!

How could this not be wonderful?!

I'll tell you how...first it didn't have all of those people in scary costumes walking up and down the aisle. From the safety of my computer I can announce with confidence that those things are ridiculous....but when I'm on the train I'm positively petrified. No this haunted train didn’t' take that route, instead they had a ghost "Expert" on board to tell ghost stories about Gettysburg. Now, I'm someone who loves oral history and I love love LOVE a good storyteller, so this had all the makings of a fabulous evening. Buuuuuttttttt this woman, our ghost "expert" was awful. She had this weird sing-song voice and she spoke for the entire two hours. One after another they came, 100 year old accounts from someone's senile aunt who remembered seeing the head of coal miner floating outside her window and so on. Eventually she ran out of supernatural and just started telling horror stories about train crashes, re-enacting whenever possible the screams of the victims and relaying in bloody detail the extent of their injuries.

I was really not alone in my dislike for the "entertainment" the people in the car around us started heckling a bit. (Don’t worry she was not near enough to hear them). Frankly, we were grateful for some comic relief because the ride was getting lloooong. haha!

Moving on we went back and had dinner at Perkins restaurant which is not very interesting but was in our direct line of vision.

After that we went back to our room and fell asleep. Big day on Saturday… we're heading out to the battlefield.