Day 12: Harrisburg, PA

And so we end another day!

Today we hit two important places to our nation's past: Mount Vernon and Gettysburg.

We woke up at a reasonable hour (8 am!) and said good bye to Lonnie, Erika, and their lovely dog Georgia, and grabbed a morning coffee before driving down to Mount Vernon.

Mount Vernon, if you didn't know, is where George Washington lived! It's his estate, and now it's carefully guarded by homeland security, which is cool, because we weren't planning on causing any trouble. At Mount Vernon we viewed Washington's slaves' houses, the gardens, inside the mansion, and Washington's tomb. It was a nice warm, almost hot, day and we walked around the grounds and enjoyed the nice breeze off the Potomac. While we were there, we stopped inside the museum and saw Washington's infamous dentures, which aren't made of wood at all! We also learned that Washington was a pretty frugal guy, because he put a stone facade on his mansion that isn't stone at all, it's made of wood and sand! We had a lot of fun there.

After that, we stopped at Taco Bell for a quick lunch and tried to drive through Arlington Cemetery, but when we realized we couldn't do that, and we would have to pay for parking, and that we had already spent too long at Mount Vernon, we moved on and drove north to Maryland. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything to do in Maryland that sounded like something we were dying to do, so we drove right through towards Gettysburg, PA.

At Gettysburg, we took the auto tour that the national park services has set up, and we saw many of the statues and monuments there. It was a very surreal sort of experience, I think as Californians, its hard to understand the Civil War sometimes, especially the technical battle stuff--we aren't re-enacting battles yearly, so we don't know the specific events of the pivotal battles, just what we learned in U.S. History. The landscape was so peaceful and pastoral, but when we looked down from the top of Little Round Top, I could imagine thousands of men running across the grounds fighting, killing, and dying. It was a pretty great experience.

After that, we hopped back into the car and drove towards Harrisburg for the night, the plan for tomorrow: Hershey, PA, the sweetest place on Earth. There's more to it, but that's all that I can remember from the plan for now!

<3 Al