Day 78

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Obfuscator writes: We left the place of which we shall not speak, as quickly as their decrepit laundry would allow. Our destination was the greener pastures of Harrisburg and nearby Gettysburg. We drove for a while to get there, as the route we had chosen between the great cesspool and Harrisburg was chosen not for speed, but for not being a major highway.

Harrisburg was much as I remembered it - decaying, shabby, and grey. The National Civil War Museum sits atop a hill near the center of the city. Having arrived on the Saturday before Veteran's Day, we were pleasantly surprised to find that in honor of the holiday, the museum had waived all admission fees. This museum normally costs about $8 a head, but it's worth that cost. It lacks the depth that Onaxthiel would like in a museum, but considering how enormous a subject the Civil War is, I am inclined to think that the museum does a pretty good job. There were a lot of special events happening in the museum, but we didn't have much time for them, as the museum itself takes quite a while to get through. We did get to hear a speaker compare logistics in the Civil War versus logistics today. It was a bit silly though, as he really didn't know much about logistics of the period, and mostly just talked about the computer logistics system that his company makes for the US government.

The museum has a lot of interesting artifacts from various people in the war, from Privates all the way up to famous Generals. It also gives the visitor a fairly good overview of many of the individual campaigns that made up the war, including how they were fought and what significance they had.

When we were done with the Civil War Museum, we headed into downtown Harrisburg to see the Statehouse. Pennsylvania rebuilt their Statehouse around the turn of the last century. Stylistically it bears a fair amount of resemblance to other Statehouses built around that time, but the architecture is distinct. For one thing, it has three domes instead of one. The large central dome seems to mostly just house a decorative entry and central hall. The capitol was basically shut down for the day, since it was Saturday, and they wouldn't let us wander outside this central hall, but it was our supposition that under the other two domes, we would find the Senate and House chambers.

We drove on to Gettysburg when we were done at the Statehouse, but didn't arrive until about quarter to five. Finding when we arrived that they would be closing at 5:00, we decided to finish our laundry and eat dinner. When this was completed, we left for a State Park not far outside of Gettysburg. We were surprised to find when we got there that most of the campsites had actually been reserved. Onaxthiel's theory is that all these State Park users were hunters. I don't have a better theory, so we're going with that. Our site had electrical hookups, and we had a lot of time on our hands to sit in the dark, so we pulled out Onaxthiel's DVD collection and entertained ourselves for a while before getting to bed under the protection of our poncho hooch.

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