Gettysburg: Part Uno

We've been home from Gettysburg for a week now and I still haven't really had a chance to write about the trip, even though I'VE BEEN DYING TO. We had such a fabulous time and we both felt like we squeezed a week long trip into two days. Which is a good thing. At least in our opinion.

Anyway, since there are a weeks worth of stories to tell, I'll try to break this up into a few parts. I can be pretty verbose as it is and I don't want anyone's eyes to drop out of their heads before we get to the part about the ticks. So here, for you, is Gettysburg: Part Uno.

Day one in Gettysburg was AWESOME. We couldn't have asked for better weather, really. It was raining when we first arrived in town, but it didn't matter because the first thing we did was hit the brand new Visitor Center which is home to a HUGE new museum. We got to see tons and tons of relics - relics that were known to have personally belonged to famous generals as opposed to just, you know, random relics. Have you ever seen this flag?



Badass, right? It was carried into battle by - uh, I totally forgot who - but it's pretty cool, huh? Each star represents a Union state or territory.



This is the very stretcher that carried Stonewall Jackson from the battlefield at Chancellorsville when he was accidentally shot by his own pickets. The blood stains you see? Totally his blood. Does that mean we could theoretically, potentially clone Stonewall Jackson? I wonder how he'd wear his facial hair nowadays

We finished up at the museum at about 2:55 p.m., but before we headed to the B&B I wanted to stop by the Visitors Information booth to ask about any special events that might be happening in the next two days. Poompy sort of went along with me because he couldn't go to the B&B without me, but he wasn't really interested in knowing about any special events. We ended up talking to the COOLEST park ranger EVER for about a half an hour. This guy had to be in his seventies, is a TOTAL Civil War buff and had some really cool suggestions for things we could do that most people don't know about. We had to endure a lecture on NOT hunting for relics, because I made a joke about a metal detector, but other than that it was super awesome. He even told us all about the history of the Iron Brigade - the brigade from Poompy's hometown. The brigade he would have been a part of if he had been born in the 1840's or 50's. Weird, huh?

TO BE CONTINUED....