Hagerstown, MD to Gettysburg, PA

Tuesday, June 24 (Tim’s 69th birthday)—Hagerstown, MD to Gettysburg, PA—45 miles; Gettysburg Comfort Inn & Suites

Up and out early in the morning. We went up to the KOA store/offices to inform them that we would not be staying the second night. The KOA manager happily refunded the money for the second night, and though we were not prepared to “rough it,” on the whole this was a pretty good KOA on Conocheague Creek, and the management was super.

We also stopped at the KOA offices because we’d been told that there would be coffee and

pastries there in the am. And there was: Make your own cup of Keurig-coffeemaker coffee for $1.79, and convenience store-type buns. Now I  have to rant a bit about Keurig coffee makers. To me they are just another example of America’s over-the-top indulgences . . . or of the Keurig Company’s clever way to rake in the $$. Those who have them must buy tiny overpackaged plastic and aluminum-foil-capped cups of flavored coffee at 10 times the price per cup of using an ordinary pound of coffee. Those who own these coffeemakers are conditioned through advertising to see them as status symbols and to argue that they can make a single cup of coffee with them. Of course one can do this with flavored or unflavored coffee and a regular coffee maker also. I don’t get it. I think Keurig coffeemaker owners and the coffee-drinking public have been bamboozled. Needless to say, neither of us indulged.

Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania northeast of Hagerstown, Maryland, so we backtracked to get to it. Had the devil of a time with the iphone GPS on the back roads, most of it caused by my ineptitude with the phone. We would plot our route and then the directions would not be verbal and we wanted (needed!) “talking” directions. After several u-turns, we finally got verbal directions and found our way, stopping in one of the small towns we passed through, which name I cannot now remember, for coffee and a good breakfast at a local café. We are in our Comfort Inn room at the moment (6 pm), having showered and gotten into comfortable clothing.

The 124 year old  G. Donald McLaughlin covered bridge we traveled through on our way to Gettysburg. The photo at the right is from the Internet showing the bridge’s wooden deck and unique bowed truss structure. The photo elongates the bridge, and the wooden decking when we crossed the bridge extended across the whole roadbed.

When we arrived in Gettysburg, we faced two disappointments. 1) A very good antiques and collectibles store on the corner of the main square had moved or gone out of business and 2) all of the antiques and collectibles stores in Gettysburg were closed on Tuesday. Bah! We wandered the square for a bit and then got back into the car and drove toward New Oxford looking for interesting places and stores to explore. We did find a couple of places, but almost everything was closed. 

We decided to tour the Gettysburg Battleground, so purchased the last two tickets for the 3:15 tour. While waiting, we ate a late lunch just down from the Tour Center in a diner—veggie beef soup, which was delicious and a club sandwich, half of which we stashed in the cooler and took back to the motel for dinner.

After lunch we returned to the tour center and joined the throngs waiting to board the tour bus, a double decker with an open top.

I had toured the battlefield in 1999 when I was attending a class at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, MD. One of my classmates and I rented bikes and pedaled the 11 miles to Gettysburg where we toured the battlefield before returning. I remembered some of the details. It is astounding and saddening to know that the three-day battle (July 1-3, 1863) involved the largest number of casualties in the entire Civil War. Between 46,000 and 51,000 soldiers from both armies were casualties! Our guide told us that when measured by today’s population that would translate to 1.5 to 2 million casualties. Minnesota, for instance, lost 69% of its fighting force—225 of 380 soldiers. On Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, used the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the fallen Union soldiers and to redefine the purpose of the war.  

The Gettysburg Battlefield tour guides are independent of the National Park Service. Our tour guide, a young woman from Maine, was excellent. She told us that as a child she’d read about the Battle of Gettysburg and had since then steeped herself in its history and gone to college to learn more. She was one of only a handful who made it through all the classes, interviews, and tests to become a battlefield tour guide. To hear her talk, one would have thought that she was there on the battlefield in 1863 fighting among the regiments of both sides.

Our guide told us that because the Confederates lost the battle, they were slow to erect monuments. The Tennessee monument (right) was dedicated in 1982. It is the last of the Confederate state monuments, and the only one paid for entirely by private donations. Our guide also told us that some school children toured the battlefield in the early 80s. They returned home and raised the money when they found that there was no Tennessee Monument on the battleground. The three soldiers and three stars on the monument represent the three regiments that fought at Gettysburg. 

After our tour we hightailed it to the air-conditioned comfort of the Comfort Inn, showered, changed into cool, loose clothes, ate from our stores and the club sandwich we’d brought back from our diner lunch and then watched more HGTV, and read before calling it a night.