America's Best Battle Site

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is another one of the places that Sara and I have always wanted to visit since we moved to the Midwest. I'd never actually been to a battle site before...we were seriously considering going up to Normandy while we were in France, but we had très peu euros out there and decided that a better use of our funds was to lick the ramekins of a few more orders of crème brûlée. After reading Band of Brothers, I've decided we made a horrible choice. We didn't really know how much time we wanted to spend looking around at Gettysburg, so we decided just to plan a whole day and if it ended up being a bust we'd kick it back in the hotel for the rest of the evening. There was so much to do there that we rushed through the area all day and still hadn't seen everything by dusk. Of course we had to go back to the hotel after dark since that place is definitely haunted to the gills.

Sara and I are pretty nerdy and decided that if we were gonna spend an entire day in such a historical place we best know our way around. On the suggestion of our good friend Donny, we read the book The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. My my my was that a great read. I would reccomend it to anyone interested in knowing about the Civil War's bloodiest battle. Of course, if you're not the type that enjoys reading, you can rent the movie Gettysburg, which is a word-per-word recreation of the book. You probably ought to have some Pepsi Max on hand as the movie is four hours long and features many bearded men. I'm glad I read the book instead of just watching the movie since a huge portion of the plot is lost during the first hour as viewers are trying to decide if that super hairy Union guy truly is Harry from Dumb and Dumber (he is).