Finally gone. First stops: Maryland Renaissance Faire and Gettysburg

After a long time fighting to get all our stuff packed and ready to go, and putting all our things back in the storage unit, and having a goodby party, we finally left!

Here is our dear friend Dan, who helped us so much. Where would we be without him!!

   Our first stop was The Maryland Renaissance Fair. We camped at a KOA near by the night before with our friends Jessica and Steve and had a really nice cookout and a few beers.
The next morning we left for the faire. Ricardo has performed at the Virginia Renaissance Faire for a coupld of years so we wanted to check out this one. We arrived there early morning and stayed pretty much until it closed. We all had a great time and drank quite a bit, haha.


Here we are after a few beers already.

After that day most of us went to a restaurant near by and after having dinner, we asked the manager if we could stay the night in their parking lot. He didn't have a problem with it so that's what we did.

The next morning we left for Gettysburg. I don't know if you guys have been there but it made a big impression to us to even think what these men had to go through! We lived in Fredericksburg VA, so we have several battlefields in that area (4 to be exact), but Gettysburg is quite a sight!
After arriving there we took a tour with a very nice Park Ranger and he pretty much in an hour and a half explained to us the whole 3 days of battle. We walked about a mile to Cemetery Ridge where a lot of the fighting took place where Pickett's Charge was aiming to break the union lines. It was sad to imagine the desperation of the Southern army and their commander Lee to try a charge like that. They were away from their supplies, poorly nurished and dying every day of disease and figthing and they literaly had no time to keep moving and fighting another day. The whole thing was rather depresing but the area and the battlefield and monuments are really beautiful.

Here is a picture of the battefield with General Meade and his horse "Old Baldy" on the right.

After the tour we had a nice lunch in the visitor center and then we took another tour of the second and third days. We walked quite a bit that day and saw many monuments. All throughout the day we could just not imagine all the suffering and death that this battle caused.

Here we are with our tour guide at the area of the battlefield where Pickett's Charge took place.

A better view of Pickett's Charge. The small group of trees on the right is the spot where the charge briefly broke the union line.

And here is a view of the battlefield from Little Round Top, where one of the bloodiest skirmishes of the whole battle took place.

After the a long day of walking and listening to stories of grat valor, courage, atrocities and pain, we had enough and that evening we left for Lititz, PA. We will wonder for a long time why we as people do these kind of things, regardles of the reason. As a wise general once said, "War is Hell".