July 2008 - Gettysburg, PA

We are in Gettysburg, PA now having arrived here on July 11th. The first photo is the PA Memorial with Doug at the top looking down. The second photo shows my great grandfather's name on the PA Monument in Company H. Next are photos of Pickett's Charge. The single tree in the distant horizon is the "High Water Mark."










We will be camped here until the first week in September. We are selling aerial photos in the Westminster, MD area and Gettysburg was the closest campground we could find. It is about 22 miles. We think it worked out just great. We can spend our mornings seeing the sights and then do the selling in the evenings and on Saturdays when folks are home from work.



We are staying at Artillery Ridge Campground which sits right at the edge of the battlefield. In fact, it is both a campground and a horse park. They have the only concession of horseback rides onto the battlefield. Or you can camp here with your own horses and ride the battlefield trails. They have various corals for the horses right by the campsites as you can see from the photos. We feel like we are back home with horses snorting and whinnying around us! Homer has had to get used to horses again. The only negative is the horse flies who have a wicked bite! This first week here has been quite hot with the temps going up into the middle nineties. With the typical PA humidity, it makes us want to spend next summer further north!

Check out our Homer getting a drink on one of those dog-days-of-summer 95 degree days. He and Doug retreated to the air conditioned comfort of the motorhome. On the weekdays the campground was quite empty with only a few folks here and there. Now that it is Friday, it is filling up again. We, naturally, prefer the weekdays when we can swim in the afternoon and have the whole pool to ourselves! Such is life!

I have been doing some research here into my great-grandfather's Civil War service. I started this several years ago when we studied the Civil War in homeschool with Josh and we had found grandpa Critchlow's service record when cleaning out my parent's house. We had found the monument where grandpa camped here and also some details of his regiment. Only 10 or 12 of the men in his company came to Gettysburg on the second day of battle. The rest were stationed along the road to Winchester as sentries. We found that Grandpa was right below Little Round Top. On the one photo of his company's monument, you can see the summit of Little Round Top though a break in the close trees. The second photo is looking in the other direction with your back to Little Round Top. Since the day I found Grandpa's service record, one of my goals has been to trace his route during the Civil War of battles that he fought in. So this is a perfect camping location and timing to do the research and then next year to travel the route, Lord willing.

Thanks for stopping by and visiting with us. We'll try to post more photos as we see the area.