Day 1 of our trip - from Richmond to Gettysburg

Just a quick note - we are going to post a travel log of our trip here, even though some of the days won't have any new tastes, as this is the easiest place to do so.  We are working through our nearly 2000 pictures and pages and pages of tasting notes.

Our first day of the trip was a drive from Richmond to Gettysburg.  We started off in the morning leaving Marty and Dave's (Megan's parents) house for the Richmond Airport where we had scheduled our rental car.  We had reserved a mid-size SUV.  When we got there, we found we had received a Ford Edge.  Ugh - we had one of those when we went to the Pacific Northwest and it rattled and clunked its way around Washington and Oregon.  This Edge was however brand new and didn't appear to have any initial rattles.  It did have Sirius/XM radio and we used that for the whole trip so that was fun.

One thing the Edge does not have is good rear and rear-side visibility. The rear window is tiny and severely limits your rearward view.  The headrests on the rear seats then block literally about 30% of the view through the rear window.  The back quarter views are almost entirely a huge blind spot and that made driving it less than fun.   We yanked off the headrests, even though we were putting the rear seats down, as we needed access to the space on the floor of the rear seats which the headrests were blocking.  We then discovered, while loading, that we had way way way too much stuff.  We had tried to pack conservatively, but when you're going for 3 weeks, there's only so much you can do.  We had two coolers which we'd filled with homemade food that we'd vacuum-packed and frozen for virtually every meal we knew we'd be eating.  The expectation was that as we emptied the coolers, we could then use that space to store other items, particularly any souvenirs or foods/drinks we wanted to bring home with us.  We left a number of items behind and fortunately didn't need anything we'd left.  We did take our two hammocks which we never even took out of the vehicle.  We also made the very fortunate decision to take some manufactured fire logs and our giant green screen shelter.  Without making room for those two things, the trip would have been much much more uncomfortable as you'll see later in our posts - it poured rain on us for days and days on our trip.  Below is a picture of all of our food before it went into the coolers.

From Day 1 - Gettysburg

Once packed, we were off and headed down the road, even if loading went slower than we expected and we left almost 2 hours later than we had planned.  Below is a map of the day's drive.

From Day 1 - Gettysburg

Our first stop was at Monocacy National Battlefield (labeled B in the map).  This is in Maryland and highlights one of the most important battles fought for control of Washington, DC and the surrounding areas.  It also, very importantly, was the first stamp in Megan's National Parks Passport book for the trip!

We then drove on to Catoctin Mountain Park (labeled C in the map).  This is a mountain wilderness area very near Camp David.  The Visitor's Center was closed and we didn't get to do much here as time was pressing.  

We then drove to the Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, PA.  We spent some time in the Visitor's Center, getting Megan a bunch of new stamps.  We then drove on and did the driving tour of Gettysburg.  The tour takes you all around the town, stopping at points of interest of the battle.  It took us about 2 hours to do the entire drive and we felt rushed honestly.  Brett had been on a guided tour before there, but Megan had not.  The battlefield stretches over such a large area and lasted for so long that it's very hard to really have a full understanding without constantly staring at the map and a timeline of the events as you drive around.  To do it right, you should really use a guided tour or have really read up on the events and carry a detailed map with you.  As on all of our trips, we heard something ridiculous about the area or events (like when a teenage girl said in the Hoh Rainforest in Washingon, "It's a rainforest, but there weren't even any monkeys.").   While up on one of the tall observation towers overlooking the site, a couple were discussing why the fighting wasn't more intense near the tower as it had obvious incredibly important strategic benefits!  Um, here's a clue - a modern, steel girder observation tower was not here during the actual battle....  You can see a picture of Megan coming down that particular tower in the pictures at the bottom. They were also wondering if their large expensive binoculars were the same quality and magnification as those they used during the battle.  

We wrapped up our day by driving to Caledonia State Park, which is a little bit away from Gettysburg, and set up camp.  We had our first vacuum-packed meal that night which was delicious, took a shower at the bath house and went to sleep.  It was a pretty nice campground and was very empty on the night we were there (Wednesday nights will do that for you).  

A slideshow of a few pictures from the day are below and you can the full-sized images in an album here.