3.08.2012 – 3.08.2012  36 °C

Nice relaxed start this morning with us spending the morning wandering around the town of Gettysburg. After the battle, most of the town became one big field hospital and mortuary. As I said yesterday, there were 50,000 casualties of this one battle.. Gettysburg would have had a population of about a thousand at the time (and wouldn’t have too many more today if you don’t count the hundreds of tourists here daily). I can’t even fathom 50,000 people who were either dead or wounded.. The dead littered the fields outside of town and had to be buried or else disease would have been rife. At first, most were interred in huge shallow graves but after the war was over Lincoln returned to Gettysburg and created the first War Cemetery and had all of the soldiers re-buried. This is when he gave the Gettysburg Address. Its only 200 words long but gosh it’s a powerful and inspiring speech (Google if you want to hear it).

We stopped into a local civil war dealer. This shop was huge and stocked full of stuff from the war. I’m actually surprised there is still that many bits and bobs left over from the war. The most surprising thing was the ammunition that was used during the war. Many of the bullets were not made of lead! They were instead fashioned from stone! I’m guessing stone was both more plentiful as well as cheap.. fired, it would certainly do just as much damage as a lead pellet… Today, you can buy your very own civil war bullet for a mere 6 dollars! Not sure what you do with it once you have it though….

After we stopped off at a thrift store to offload some unwanted clothes we continued onwards to DC! From Gettysburg to DC is only a couple of hours so we arrived in town right on lunch time and rush hour. Traffic was pretty manic getting to our hotel. Most of the roads that I had planned to take would not allow us to do a RH turn so we just had to keep driving and driving thru town. I eventually gave up navigating and turned to the sat nav to get us to our hotel!

We arrived about 2pm so we put the car into a parking garage, stowed our gear and grabbed ourselves something to eat at the restaurant attached to the hotel. An hour later (and after a crappy lunch) D and I headed out to the airport to drop off the buggie.

The drive out was very uneventful. Dulles is a good 40mins from downtown so it took us quite awhile to get ourselves out to the airport. We dropped off the crap mobile at Pennies and headed to the terminal to look for a bus back into town. We stood at the bus stop for quite a while with another twenty odd people all waiting to go back into town. We saw another bus turn up (upstairs to where we were standing) so we decided to hightail it up there to catch the private express bus back into town.. Or that’s what we thought! We turned up and was told that it would drop us at the closest metro from which we could then catch the train back to our hotel.

As it turned out this was the best of a not great situation. We had a relaxing bus trip for 20 mins or so (it did cost us 10 dollars each though) and just as we pulled off the road (to go to the metro) a huge traffic jam had formed up on the fwy. We had seen this jam as we were driving out to the airport and were glad we were driving in the opposite direction so the metro was easily the quickest way today to get back to town. Another twenty minutes later and we were back at our hotel. Speaking of which, if you’re ever in Washington DC and looking for a cheap motel in a great location (right near the Mall, Smithsonian, White House) check out the Hotel Harrington (corner of 11^th and E Streets). Accom is basic but clean, awesome location right near Metro and within easy walking distance to most of the top attractions.. 130 dollars a night… you won’t beat it in DC!

After a tiring couple of hours with the car we were both glad to get back and find a cold drink! I headed up the road to find a shop and met D&M in the bar twenty minutes later. Dinner was a relaxed affair (toasted sandwiches) before we headed to bed ready to hit DC tomorrow!

Song of the Day- Jackson Brown, Running on Empty