Road Trip Day 1: Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

For Spring Break this year we decided to cash in on Josh's huge cache of hotel points and do a road trip down south. It was the best time! I took a long time planning out every detail and doing lots of research, and it actually came together wonderfully. We loved every minute of it. On day one we drove away from the snow flurries in New Jersey and drove to Raleigh, NC. On the way, we stopped in Gettysburg, PA and spent a couple hours at the Visitor Center and the beautiful grounds. Here are a few pictures...

 An old photo of Gettysburg that Bryn thought was fabulous.

 It was neat to look at all the old artifacts. The guns were one of the highlights.

 Tate was loving this old canon and Bryn was loving the old uniforms of the North and South soldiers.

 Lots of old instruments and two silly sisters.

They had a neat display of canon shells and a cool video of how the old canons worked. 

Bryn loves Clara Barton after reading a book about her, so she shrieked to see a display about her :)

 There was a really moving video, narrated by Morgan Freeman that talked about the history of Gettysburg and we loved it! It made me teary, which I wasn't expecting.

Then we did the "cyclorama" (pictured above) which is a huge original oil painting of Gettysburg that fills the walls of a large circular room. There is a narrator that talks about the battle and they use lights and effects to show different aspects of the war. That is a bad description of it, but it was really neat and the girls loved it. 

 Here is another image of the large painting. 

 We love Abe!

 The suggested time to see all the Gettysburg sites is three hours and we didn't have enough time to cover all of it, but we loved walking around and seeing some of the monuments and the cemetery. 

We LOVED Gettysburg! It was so informative for Josh and I and even for Bryn and Mya. Mya is still talking about "that place where we learned about the north and the south fighting". It was definitely a sobering experience to spend time in Gettysburg and reflect on all those who fought for our freedoms and helped shaped our nation. 

We did a lot of driving this first day and we worried how Tate would handle it. Surprisingly, he was a champ! He read his board books about 100 times each, ate his weight in snacks, and then had fun with this little cookie sheet - playing with magnets and coloring... on the paper and on his own face! Ha ha! We actually love spending time together in the car, so we didn't mind all the driving.