Gettysburg

Day 14 September 26, 2024 Gettysburg 141 miles

We left our hotel at about 0730. The weather stayed reasonably dry today. It did rain overnight and Woodie’s engine was wet. Therefore it didn’t want to start. Rob wiped everything dry and sprayed it with Wire Dryer. Then the car started right away. We still have a small leak in the radiator so Rob had to add about 1/2 gallon of antifreeze.

We are headed to the Antietam Battlefield which is located in Maryland. The trip down was on narrow one lane roads with lots of hills and curves. Rob really got a work out with the driving. We didn’t know there could be so many backroads. All these backroads had houses scattered along the way. Some of the driveways go steeply upward and some go steeply downward. I would hate to drive any of these roads in snowy weather. We go in and out of forest areas. Some houses are old and some are new. Some are small and some are very large. We also went through many small communities. We are definitely not in the city.

Coffee break was at a Lutheran church. Unfortunately they ran out of coffee. We were late in arriving at the location so we didn’t have time to view their quilts. A quilter’s nightmare.

When we arrived at the Antietam Battlefield we had to park in the overflow lot. The National Parks pass worked here. We watched a 30 minute movie about the battle. That sure helps when you drive through the area. We were able to spot several of the areas described in the movie. Just like Gettysburg the area is very large. The terrain here is more rolling hills rather than low and high areas.

The drive to the lunch location was challenging to us. The directions on how to exit didn’t seem to match the roads we were seeing. Then we saw several other cars and decided to follow them. That worked for a ways but the road combined with their speed we soon lost them. The road kept getting smaller and the lines have disappeared. We must be lost. We started to turn around when another car came up and said we were going the right way. Well we did make it to the lunch location and enjoyed a sack lunch.

On the same grounds were two small museums. One contained farm equipment and the other cars and bicycles. Both were interesting.

More narrow roads, curves and hills to the afternoon break. That was a creamery with locally made ice cream. The break felt good. The ice cream wasn’t too bad either.

The remainder of the drive wasn’t quite as challenging but we didn’t get back to the host hotel until 5:30. We checked to see if we won any of the baskets which we did not. Our donation went to a good cause.