After a free taste titillating breakfast we headed out to tour Gettysburg and the battlefield. Another opportunity to connect with America the meaningful rather being constantly subjected to America the mean. Autumn is an appropriately melancholy season to visit what amounts to a very, very large cemetery.
Norm's over familiarity appears to have caused Abe to go "what the hey!?".
A truly magnificent monument erected by the state of Pennsylvania to memorialize its sons and daughters who served rises like a beacon from the flat terrain. We climbed to the top for a stirring view.
Forever charging forward, forever certain he will live forever. No deferment for bone spurs or ingrown nose hairs for this stalwart.
View from the top of the monumental edifice shown previously. Many different battles took place in various sites over the three days the battles lasted. There are hundreds of monuments, large and small, scattered over the entire area. Many are secluded, surrounded by trees and silence, others in the open fields as unprotected as the soldiers who charged forward into the abyss.
The slaughter of Pickett's charge is memorialized in a buffet at the Battle Theater. Choke on it.
We had to swing by the state Capitol in Harrisburg, fully restored to its Beaux Arts/Renaissance Revival splendor. This is a real peoples' Capitol with a noisy group of protestors holding an anti-white supremacist rally while in the rotunda lobby inside press conferences were scheduled all day long.
Is this perchance a Beaux orgy?
Now this is impressive and actually being there makes it more so.
The legislation that comes from this chamber of beauty must itself be beautiful.
As long as we were in Harrisburg, a few miles further brought us to Hershey, Pennsylvania via the Hershey Highway (aka Highway 422).
Sweets for the sweet, so to speak.
A poster from the old days when they still needed people to make the stuff.
We may have bypassed Harper's Ferry, but we doubled down with a visit to Valley Forge. A quite unpleasant winter of 1777-78 where over 2,000 troops died of disease. In fact, for every soldier killed an action, 10 died of disease. And we're not talking bone spurs here.
Cheesey or ennobling, you decide. Yes, this is an effigy of George Washington.
Times have changed: Yes, hardship though there was, there were women wintering at Valley Forge. Some fought, but mostly this broadside describes their domestic responsibilities - laundering, sewing, the usual suspects.
Free to enter and browse - this land is your land, this land is my land. Brits go home.
We arrived at our hotel in summer-type weather of 85 degrees.
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