Gettysburg and Life

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When visiting Gettysburg, I recommend seeing the movie after an orientation tour. We saw the movie first but many places in the following diorama didn’t make much sense to us.

1st thing in the morning we went on a bus tour, we wanted the private car tour but those are not easy to find, 1st come/1st serve. The bus tour is fine for getting a feel of the area; the tour guides are volunteers and are good for some basic info. Our guide was eager to impart as much info as he could and did some by examples; how the regiments were lined up. But they cover the entire park in a loop so there is mostly general info.

We then took a ranger led hike at 3:30 from the cemetery. The ranger led the hike out to the area of Picket’s Charge. Of course this was a specific area and over the same amount of time as the bus tour so there was much more info here.

Because it was overcast and off and on rain it was easy to get a sense of the enormity of the horror here creating a dark mood. But then the beauty of the changing fall foliage combined the past and present. Life goes on.

This dark mood was fitting as we had just learned that our granddaughter will be born with a defect and much too early, plus we planned to visit my niece who is full of melanoma. We were full of despair and sadness already then to see a place like the wheat field where 4,000 bodies lie from the bombardment was so sad. It appropriately started raining.

We then got a call from our son, in a panic; it seems that our daughter-in-law had already started labor, at only 25 weeks. Please, he asked, can you come home now? We went back to the RV and packed up for the 2,700 mile drive back.

As we left the sun came out.

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