Gettysburg

We arrived at Gettysburg fairly late in the day on a Friday and decided to start by getting the lay of the land and stop by the visitor center.  That left Saturday for exploring. However, the visitor center at Gettysburg is less robust than other visitor centers.  It is considered a "museum" and is behind a pay wall. The park doesn't have an entrance fee, so that probably evens out for most people. Unfortunately for us they don't allow the use of national park passes to get into the museum. 

There was plenty to do around the park without paying to get into the visitor center museum. We don't know what we missed, but there definitely was plenty to explore. 

There are several ways to explore the park including paying for a bus tour or hiring an official guide to come in your car and give you a tour. As always, we elected for the free version. We started the day with a ranger walk that left from the visitor center and gave an overview of the whole battle. It was called Three Days in 90 Minutes. It was well done and gave a good overview. 

Next we followed signs for the "Auto Tour." There is a tour throughout the park with stops and information at key points. It is a chronological tour and meanders around a bit. It ended up taking us most of the day to do these two tours. By the end, we'd had enough of the civil war for the day.

 

 

It is amazing, however, the extent to which the civil war defines the state of Virginia. Everywhere we drove over the following two days there were signs for battle memorials and historic sites. Not to mention the astounding number of confederate flags people were flying. We need to do more reading about this area and the mind set, but we have a hard time understanding the confederate flag flying. Many people are flying their confederate flags proudly next to their American ones which we find incredibly ironic.