Vacation 2013 - Post #3, Gettysburg, PA. (Pt 2 - The Town/battlefield)

I covered the museum, albeit haphazardly in the last vacation post.  I'll try to do better with a little help from Robby on this one, since Gettysburg is one of his "specialities"!  I have my doubts that it will actually happen because every time I invite him in here, the conversation devolves into some type of football non-sense.

Go figure...

It's rather difficult to put everything that you saw on this day, into words.  It's breath-taking to be driving on a road that was built on a ridge of land where so many men lost their lives and the battle of Gettysburg began, McPhersons Ridge.  To see the monuments & memorials, literally, every way that you turned.

These photos are not in the order in which they happened on our tour.  Since we were working three cameras, they tended to get jumbled up a bit and out of order.  No matter, they're still good and bring back great memories.

One of many memorials as you drive down this fantastic road lined with canons left from the war.  I believe this was a North Carolina memorial for some reason but if you trust my memory, prepare to be disappointed and wrong... a lot!

This is up on Little Round Top. 

Standing up here and looking out in all directions, you can get a real sense of how important the hill was to the battle, being look-out points, firing down upon thine enemy and so on.  Great stuff!  That collection rocks down there towards the middle of the picture is known as Devils Den.  Bushman's hill is just out of the upper left side of the photo. 

I believe this is the memorial of General Henry Wanner Slocum... 

These particular types of memorials are nearly everywhere!  They mark the different infantries that fought in the war.  Sadly, you do not have enough time to stop and read them all unless you were going to spend a full week in the town of Gettysburg.

This was taken on the ridge that I spoke of above.  There are endless plaques and canons along this road and the cd we purchased for the driving tour named how many men died where you're currently driving.  Heavy stuff.

Along that same road...

You'll see this memorial building/tower in a lot of photos of Little Round Top.  It's extra cool because you get to climb up the inside of it as we'll see shortly...

Up on top of that memorial with Momma and Master C!  How cool is that looking out over that battlefield behind them and wondering about everything that happened on that ground!?

Three monkey's at the bottom of the steps as we descended back to ground level.

This was out on the driving tour as well.  I couldn't tell you what we're looking at here, but I thought it was a cool picture, so I included it.

I cannot remember what this was called and oddly enough, out of all of the cool memorial based pages on the fancy hi-tech world wide interweb, I could not find any photos of it based on a cursory glance.

I believe this is the barn at the Trostle farmstead where "Bigelows Desperate Stand" took place.  If you note those two decorative brick designs on this side of the barn, just to the bottom of the right one, you can see a hole in the bricks.  That's a cannon ball hole that was never repaired.

This is one of the old stone fences that was used as shelter for troops.  These cannons are either not the originals here or have been restored, but I cannot recall which.

Note the condition of this cannon!  It's all painted up and looking spiffy.  The fences are original although they have been repaired a bit in some places as some of them are actual fences that are still being used.

This guy was awesome.  He was a Union General and talked to us in character.  He took his very real sword out and showed the boys how he would direct troops and such.  Very cool!

And that's about all I'm going to post about the battlefield tour although we have about another 200 pictures or so.  

Did Robby help?  A little bit with a few facts.  Better than I expected, but not quite as good as what I was hoping for.