Gettysburg

We made a day trip to Gettysburg in the rental car.  It was a very pleasant outing, made even more so by returning north of the Mason-Dixon Line, if only for a few hours.  I had been there twice before.  The first was as a grade schooler sometime before April 1960 when we left for Japan.  We had been living in Prince George's County, Maryland.  The second was in 1973, not long before I graduated from the Naval Academy.  Penny had never been there, even though she graduated from George Washington University in D.C.

There is a new visitor center and it is very informative.  You can find many descriptions and analyses of the battle on line, and so I won't go into that here.  It was a good day for pictures.  (Hurrah!  The history prof has spared us!)  ;-)

There is a driving tour of the battlefield, and an early part of it goes along Seminary Ridge, which was where the Confederates formed up to launch their various assaults on the positions of the Union's Army of the Potomac.  Most of the guns are replicas.

Fall colors were beautiful here as they were in Massachusetts and New York.

The blue and gray port-a-potty motif is found throughout the park.

These next photos relate to the 20th Maine regiment's defense of Little Round Top on the battle's second day.  The monument is located among that outfit's positions, and you can see the area from whence charged the Alabama rebels whom the Mainers defeated and turned back.

This road looks much as it would have looked in 1863.