8/3/15 - Gettysburg, PA

We drove to Gettysburg, PA today.  We found a Passport American RV park 1 mile from the entrance to the Gettysburg National Battlefield.  We drove to the visitors center and bought tickets to go to Eisenhower’s farm and house for 9 am tomorrow morning.  This park does not honor the Federal Golden Age pass.  Everything you do here you have to pay for.  We had a little time before the closing of others destinations in the park so the first stop was at the Gettysburg Lincoln Train Station.  This is where Abraham Lincoln came to give his Gettysburg Address at the National Cemetery.  Next was a stop at the David Wills house.  This is where Lincoln spent the night while in Gettysburg.  Then we drove to the Soldiers National Cemetery.  Just as we arrived a tour was starting in a few minutes.  We took the 45 minute tour of the cemetery.

8/4/15 - Gettysburg, PA

We caught the shuttle bus to the Eisenhower National Historic Site.  We went on a tour of the house and then walked around on the grounds.  Ike bought the house in 1950 and he and Mamie lived there after his presidency.  The back porch reminded us of the one in Jim's parents' house in Tyler.

We went back to the visitors center and bought tickets for the movie, museum and Cyclorama.  The Cyclorama was a huge circular painting depicting Pickett's Charge at the battle of Gettysburg.  It was painted in 1883 and was recently restored after suffering decades of neglect.  

The museum had lots of artifacts from the battle and the Civil War in general.  

Then we drove the whole battlefield road.  This was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War..  There are over 1,300 monuments here.  We took pictures of a few of them.  When we got back to the trailer we washed clothes.

 

8/5/15 - Boonsboro, MD

We left Gettysburg this morning and drove to Greenbrier State Park near Boonsboro, Md.  After setting up we drove to Catoctin Mountain Park.  We took a short hike to the Blue Blazes still.  We were on our way to Cunningham Falls and met a Mennonite or Amish couple on the way back.  They said the falls was barley running and really not worth the 3.5 miles round trip.  So, we turned around and went back to the truck.  We drove to Frederick and went to Flying Dog Brewing.  It is only open Thursday through Sunday so we will go back later.  There were two brewpubs, Barley & Hops and Brewers Alley, in Frederick so we went there.  Then we went back to the Casita for supper.

8/6/15 - Boonsboro, MD

The electric sites in the state park are booked up for the weekend so we drove through the boondocking sites and picked one out to move to on Friday.  Then we drove to Antietam National Battlefield and drove the roads through it.  The heaviest fighting was at a cornfield, a sunken road now known as Bloody Lane, and at Burnside's Bridge.  This was the bloodiest single day battle in the nation’s history -- there were over 23,000 casualties.  General John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade suffered the most casualties at 83% loss, mostly at the cornfield.  Ft. Hood in Texas is named after General Hood. 

 Then we drove to Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. We walked around town and saw a movie about John Brown’s failed raid on the National Armory here.  We walked across the Shanandoah River into Maryland to see lock 33 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Site. 

On the way back to camp we stopped in Boonsboro at Dan’s Tap House and had a few IPA beers.  Today was National IPA Day and all the IPAs were $3.00.  We also talked to a nice young man who was born in Kileen, Texas near Ft. Hood.  He also was a homebrewer.  We told him about the Dixie Cup and encouraged him to submit some of his beers to the competition.

8/7/15 - Boonsboro, MD

The hookup sites are booked for the weekend, so we had to move to another camping loop.  Today we drove to Monocacy National Battlefield.  This was a relatively small battle during the Civil War but it delayed the Confederate Army from attacking Washington D.C. and allowed time for Union reinforcements to be deployed.  After going through the museum we drove into the battlefield.  At the first site we stopped at I started having bad pains in my chest/stomach area and my right jaw started hurting.  It scared me so I told Jim and he drove me to the hospital in Frederick.  They hooked me up to the EKG machine to make sure I wasn’t having a heart attack.  They did some blood work to make sure no enzymes from a heart attack were in my system and also did a chest x-ray.  The results were all negative.  The diagnosis was acid reflux and low potassium.  I got a prescription for potassium tablets and was told to use Prilosec for 14 days.  If it continues I will go see my doctor when we return home.   

After being released from the hospital we went to a local cemetery and visited the grave and monument of Francis Scott Key (who penned the Star Spangled Banner during the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British during the War of 1812.  Before returning to the Casita, we stopped at Flying Dog Brewing in Frederick.

8/8/15 - Boonsboro, MD

This morning I made oatmeal for breakfast and we sat outside to figure out our plans for the next week.  Out neighbors across the street had left their trunk open most of the day and the light inside ran the battery down.  We jumped their battery off with our cables.  We checked out the beach on the small lake in the park.  There were tons of people there since it was Saturday.  Around 3 pm we drove to Hagerstown and went to Antietam Brewing.  We talked to a Navajo young man there who was from Tuba City, Arizona.  He was up here working.  After dinner we walked around camp to get some steps since we didn’t get many yesterday.

8/9/15 - Delmar, MD

Today is my son’s birthday so I called him.  We left our camp and drove to Delmar, Maryland.  This route took us over a toll bridge over the Chesapeake Bay.  There were 11 tolls booth lanes that led into 2 lanes on the bridge.  The backup before the toll booths and then merging afterward into the 2 lanes took a long time.  We got to camp in Delmar and are on the Maryland side of the town.  The main street through town is the state line.  We didn’t have enough time to go to the shore and be able to enjoy it, so we will go tomorrow.  We drove into Salisbury and went to Evolution Brewing and then back to Delmar to 3^rd Street Brewing.  There was a food truck parked at 3^rd Street and Jim bought us each a really good crab cake sandwich.  It was a large crab cake chock full of crabmeat.  The crab cake sandwich came with tarter sauce, it didn’t need anything else.