Notes from Taber

07.01.11We're in the car on the way home and Beth is at the wheel.  We had a terrific day yesterday at Harpers Ferry.  Luke decided that the drive is the least favorite part of the trip.  He threw up shortly after lunch and is now occupying the front seat and trying to sleep.  I'm sitting behind Beth and after getting a short nap in I'm attempting to hack out a blog post.  My bright idea was to skip to Chicago by staying south and heading across Ohio and Indiana. The traffic has been great and we've avoided the large number of tolls that we had to pay on the way out to Gettysburg, but it seems like it is taking a little longer.  On the way out we had a head start with the trip to Wisconsin Dells so the return trip is already a little longer.

When we were driving into Gettysburg earlier this week we had passed some funny signs and talked about wishing that we had gotten photos so we made sure to stop and get photos on the way home.  The photos are of some store signs and probably won't seem funny any more!  We'll post them and you can be the judge.  "Sheetza" is a gas station and we thought their pizza ads we entertaining, but none of our photos turned out real well so I stole one off of the interweb.

We had also passed signs for the Flight 93 Memorial and talked about visiting it, but never stopped or turned around.  We detoured the return trip and stopped there this morning; adding another powerful experience to the trip.  The memorial is temporary right now, but you can walk to an overlook and see the construction site and the memorial is supposed to be complete by September 11, 2011.  The temporary building is an old mine or quarry building that was orignally reclaimed by the FBI and is now houses simple displays and information about the terrorist attacks and a step by step through the events all the way through the construction of the memorial.  One of the things that intrigued me was transcipts of the radio traffic and some of the phone calls that passengers made. I had never understood everything that took place in such detail and it was interesting, but as I indicated earlier it was also very sad and tragic.

On Thursday we spent the day outside of Gettysburg with a trip to Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia.  Harpers Ferry is of course the home site of John Brown's short lived rebellion.  The site had many other stories to tell and was interesting and beautiful.  The museum is interwoven into the historic buildings and seems very much like you are in the historic town in the 1860s.  We were disappointed that there were modern cars driving throughout the town as we explored, but the beauty of the area outweighed a couple cars.  Hearing all of the stories was interesting, but as we experienced in Gettysburg there were bigger and better interpretive events planned for the weekend and we read about all of the great things to come.

When we drove out to Harpers Ferry we passed signs for the National Fallen Firefighter Memorial in Emmitsburg, MD and Luke and Beth were patient with me as we stopped on the way home.  Adding to the Gettysburg battlefield this was also very powerful, but in a different way.  The names of firefighters who died in the line of duty each year are identified on plaques for each state, year by year.  There is a separate plaque for the 343 firefighters who died on 09.11.01 and a special tribute to the FDNY firefighters who gave all.  There is a brick lined path leading to the memorials and each brick is available to be purchased, inscribed and placed on the path.  I'll be submitting a request to the LFD Relief Association to "purchase" bricks for the path and inscribe them from Lakeville Fire Rescue.

Luke was determined to find an 1860's era civilian vest and as we drove back into Getysburg we tried to sneak in to the site where the Gettysgurg re-enactment was getting set up to see if we could visit a sutler tent.  We probably tried to do things too properly and were sent on our way because we didn't have passes and the event wasn't yet open to visitors.  We also visited a great little covered bridge as well.  The rest of the day was easy going and we had some down time in the hotel room with pizza and a movie.