Gettysburg, PA

On July 5th, we visited Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Jason was really excited for me to see it because he loved it when he had visited about 5 years ago. When we got there, we were all surprised to see a new visitor's center built in 2008. We went in to check it all out. This is the day where my pictures run really short. Most of Gettysburg and the rest of the day are on our friend's camera, but I'll give you a run-down regardless.

When we entered the visitor's center, we were surprised to see how large it was. We walked around a little and saw some old Civil War-era guns, uniforms and general relics. We weren't prepared for the rest of the museum to CHARGE us. After all, this is a National Park so it should be free. It was around $12 per person (there were 7 of us) and then $30 or $40 to do some type of tour which included a movie. We weren't doing that. We went to the visitor's center store where I bought an 1863 Infantry Tactics book to send to my brother. I thought he'd get a kick out of it.....seeing how much things have changed, especially since he's in a war zone now. Outside, I got some pictures of the Maryland state flower, the Black-Eyed Susan (yes, I know I was in PA when I took the pic):

Also, some Queen Anne's Lace:

Then, we headed out to the Eisenhower viewing tower to view the Gettysburg battlefield. On our way there, we missed the turn and turned onto the next street. We were trying to find a place to turn around when we saw the sign that said it was a private driveway. Our two vehicles immediately began to make u-turns on a tiny one-lane road when all of a sudden, a red PT Cruiser races down the road the same way we came and blocked us off! He wanted to know what we were doing on the road and he meant business! There were no signs on his car, but he was in a Park Ranger uniform. We looked at the guy like he was stupid, informed him that we missed our turn and were trying to turn around, then left. He gave us the stank eye the entire time we passed him. Then, he followed us to make sure that we were going where we said we where going. What a weirdo!

We found out afterward that the road goes straight into the Eisenhower family farm residence. The tower is also located on the farm, but it's the public part of it. The tower is really, really high and you have to climb up stairs to get up there. Even though I'm in shape and we'd done a lot of walking, my thighs were burning going up those steps. But the view was worth it.

The farmhouse is in that picture, but it's almost impossible to spot, even after zooming in. It was pretty far way from where we where. Directly behind us was this view:


The right peak is Big Round Top and the left is Little Round Top. You can't tell in this picture, but Little Round Top has rocks on it that you can visit. Little Round Top is where the Confederate troops tried to attack the Union troops unsuccessfully on July 2, 1863 in the Battle of Gettysburg. We looked at all the ground that the Civil War took place on......imagining a type of war where you walked onto the battlefield to almost certain death. These were men and women who were extremely brave.

When we climbed down, I checked out some canons on the bottom that belonged to the army of Northern Virginia (remember they seceded from the Union):


By now, were were hungry, so we went to eat at The Dobbin House, where our friends had their wedding reception. We ate in the tavern downstairs, which was lit almost exclusively by candlelight. This place was really neat! It was built in 1776 by Irish Reverend Alexander Dobbin who came to help settle the area. And settle he did! He had 10 children with his first wife and remarried a widow who had 9 children of her own! Can you say Duggar family?

Later, in the mid-1800s, the house served as a station for the Underground Railroad (we saw the crawl space they hid in) and then a hospital after the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. This was a truly unique place to eat....the wood is over 200 years old...that's hard to imagine! I wish I had taken a picture of the outside, but you can see it on the website I tagged above. After dinner, we headed back to the house and then watched movies.

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Day 4 - Antietam, MD

Day 4 (July 4) was spent lazily getting dressed and sending our friend to get us a good picnic spot on the Antietam battlefield for the night's festivities. Antietam is the site of the Civil War's bloodiest battle. In fact, it is still the bloodiest one-day battle in U.S. history. Each year in early July (usually not on the fourth), the Maryland Orchestra plays American songs to about 30,000 spectators on blankets. About 20,000 people died in that battle. It was very hard to imagine that 2/3 of the crowd would be dead if that war had occurred while we were there. Very mind blowing.

If you look closely in this picture, you'll see that sections have been drawn out on the field so that you can put your blankets down and then still leave plenty of room for walkways. It's very, very organized!

We were right in the front since we staked out our claim early as you can tell from here. We were able to get a congressman's parking tickets so we had excellent parking as well!


While we waited for things to start, I walked around a little and found some canons. These will be used for the 1812 Overture in the program:

I also found older canons that were used in the Civil War:


Just before the show, we got a fly-by of some antique planes flown by veterans. The picture came out crappy, but they were a lot closer than this looks:

The show started and we began with "The Star Spangled Banner" as we watched a flag being raised over the stage. We also listened to several old American favorites as we sipped on wine and beer and stuffed our faces with veggies, fruit, cheese and crackers. Here's Jason & I:

Check out those Popeye arms! Ha ha! Here's our friends Jason & his wife Deb:

We all watched the sunset:

As the sun went down, we saw some flickering lights and realized they were lighting bugs. It has been YEARS since I've seen them and it felt like such an Americana moment as we listened and watched in awe this beautiful sight:

As the last song of the night played, the flag was lowered and the fireworks went off! I think these pictures are too bad for an amateur:



After the loooooong, awesome fireworks show was over, we sat around for about 3o minutes before trying to leave. Although we got amazing parking, it would still take an hour to get out. So, we chatted and finally loaded our stuff back in the truck. By this time, it took about 30 more minutes to get out and head home. Then, we all just watched some boob tube and headed to bed. It was an awesome way to spend the Fourth!

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Wow........

The forecast says it will be 104 degrees at 5pm. Nope, that's not the heat index, that's the actual temperature. My combustible self will be indoors, thank you!

Be jealous.

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I'm baaaack!

Actually, I got back late Tuesday night, but I didn't download any pics from my camera until tonight. Our trip to Maryland was amazing! I'll post the pics I have of each day here, but our friends have a million more pics to give us. Here goes Day 1 - 3 recap.

We flew into Baltimore on Wednesday July 1. Our friends were already in Ocean City, so one of them had to make the 2 hour trip to the airport to pick us up. Yes, Jason & I are THAT cool. We get our butts off the airplane, haul butt to pick up our suitcases and then plant our butts firmly into a truck for 2 more hours. Let me tell you, our butts were working hard. We made the 2 hour trip to Ocean City with just one absolutely necessary stop to Burger King for food. BK is not really my food of choice, but we were starving and desperate. It hit the spot.

We finally arrive in Ocean City, put our suitcases down in our suite, then head out to the boardwalk for more food. We decide to eat at a cute little seaside pizza place that had a great view on the deck. This is what the ocean looked like at sunset:

The ocean was blue and the sand was white and clean. They actually have a vacuum cleaner that sucks all the junk off the sand every night and they even import some sand in to keep it looking nice. Completely unlike anything in the gulf. After dinner, we went walking on the boardwalk and stopped to look at the Ocean City 9/11 memorial.

This was dedicated to not only the New York and Ocean City firefighters, but all the firefighters in the world. They also had a piece of the World Trade Center on display:


The boardwalk was really neat. It's just like the old-fashioned ones you see in movies.....highly commercialized and lots to see. They had a carnival at one end, touristy shops in between and plenty of places to nosh at scattered throughout.

After walking around for a few hours, we were beat and hit the sack. The next day we had some breakfast and then rented a surrey. Here's myself, Tori, Julia & Deb pedalling down the boardwalk.

Since I am combustible in sunlight due to the lightness of my skin, I got a strange sunburn on my legs from the surrey. It didn't show up until later, but it was enough to keep me from wearing shortish shorts throughout most of the trip. We pedaled for our hour, touring the entire 1 mile or so of boardwalk and then headed out to the beach. We layed out there for several hours (myself under an umbrella because of the aforementioned fire hazard) and just relaxed. I did manage to get in the water so that I could say I've been in the Atlantic ocean once. It was freaking cold! The gulf may be dirty, but at least it's warm. The Atlantic was torture and I wouldn't get in past waist deep. The funny thing about the Atlantic was that you could only go a little ways before the ocean floor dropped off. So there were tons of people all lined up at the same place trying to jump waves. In contrast, when you're in the gulf, you see people at all depths because it's not as deep and you don't have to worry as much about sharks. I think I'll keep my dirty old gulf water, thank you.

We finally dragged ourselves inside to shower and get ready to eat again. We headed back out to figure out what to eat when little 7-year-old Angela spotted something she had to touch:

Yes, that's an iguana on a bench. On a boardwalk. At the beach. See the guy behind her? He said he sits out there everyday and has now been "keeping track" of where people are from. What was even more strange was the missing tip jar. We ate at a yummy seafood place where I had crabcakes with green beans and rice. Since Jason & I rarely pass up a photo opportunity, we had to take a picture with this HUGE anchor. It's hard to tell in the picture because of the angle, but it's way taller than Jason.

We then walked around some more, watched the kids ride some carnival rides, eat yummy ice cream and then sat out on our balcony and killed a bottle of wine. The next day was lazy and we took our time packing up. We loaded up the truck, then walked the boardwalk some more and shopped around. Finally, we decided to make the 3 hour trip back to Frederick, MD and call it a night.

More to come......

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Long time, no see!

So, it's been over 2 weeks since I've blogged. I've been in a bit of a funk lately and just haven't felt like blogging. Plus, I just can't figure out anything worth blogging. It's probably my mood. I'm still in the job market and have had no luck whatsoever. There's not much open in my area. I've just now started to get a little depressed about the whole thing....I've really let it get to me. I've been out of the job market for too long and now I'm afraid I may have missed my chance. This economy really is terrible!

In other news, Jason's been hard at work trimming our crape myrtles and a few other trees. He took out an entire bush behind the garden and things are starting to look better. The garden is growing nicely and we've already harvested several squash, zucchini and green beans. We decided that we both hate peas so he pulled those plants up. They weren't producing much anyway. It's so hot here (highs in the 100s for several weeks now and no rain) that I have to water religiously. Thank goodness my city isn't in water restrictions yet. They practice "year-round water conservation" so I can't water between 10am and 8pm any day of the year. Our backyard is burning up so we're trying to water at night to give it a fighting chance of surviving August.

We've also bought paint and fixtures for the 1/2 bath. We haven't started that project because Jason wants to get other things done outside first. There are so many other projects that we want to start but we can't until I find a job and can bring in a second income. I think that's the depressing part.

My brother has been in Afghanistan for a few weeks now and I've already mailed him a package. He got it in 4 days which has got to be a record! He's doing well out there and has been able to call my parents a few times with a cell phone he bought there. He was at Bagram Air Base when it was hit by rockets but luckily was on the other side of the base when it happened. I pray for his safety every single night.

The most exciting news that I have is that we are going to Maryland on the 1st. We have friends there and we are really excited to visit. Jason was there on business a few weeks ago and said the weather was amazing. We plan to go to Ocean City to check out the Atlantic and an old fashioned board walk, spend the 4th at Antietam battlefield, and then a day or two in Washington, DC. I'm sure that's not all that we'll do, but I'll have plenty to blog about when we come back on the 7th!

Thanks for hanging in there and reading. I appreciate all 3 of my readers!

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Green Monster: Redo

Remember the green monster I tried? It wasn't too bad, but I decided to change things up to see if I could make it work as a post-workout drink. This time, I blended:

• 1/2 cup unsweetened Almond Breeze
• 1/2 frozen banana
• 1 scoop milk chocolate protein powder
• 1 cup spinach leaves

And that's it. I didn't add ice, because I didn't want it to be too much of a smoothie. I like to drink my protein a little quicker and this was the perfect consistency for me. It was more chocolatey than anything. I enjoyed this one and will definitely be making it again!

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Our first harvest!

The garden has come along nicely and we finally were able to pick a couple of the zucchini.

They look nice, don't they? But let's see them in comparison with my arm!

They're longer than my forearm! And just let me say that this was a really hard picture to take by myself. Here's a look at our garden today:

The squash and zucchini have taken over the whole thing! Since before, we've braced the tomatoes and the sugar snap peas. Out of two red bell pepper plants, we have one pepper growing so far:

Both pepper plants look kind of sad, but when Jason went back to the store, he said that their plants look the same. I thought something was wrong, but apparently not. Here's the spinach:

It's about the size of the baby spinach that you can buy in stores, but I'm going to let it get bigger. The squash plants are coming along nicely:


The squash plants are a little smaller than I expected, but they bloomed very quickly. They are devoting more of their energy towards growing their fruit, so they haven't grown in size recently. The real stars of the show are the zucchini plants:

Looks a lot like the squash plants until you see the size of those leaves compared to my hand:

They're huge, too! And here's a couple pics of some zucchini that isn't quite ready to be picked yet.


Our green beans are growing quickly and finally have little blooms on them. No beans yet, but when they start, we will have tons of them.

The sugar snap peas are a mystery to us. We don't know what to expect from them and they haven't seemed to grow any bigger recently. Jason put some stakes in so that they wouldn't grow out of control, but.....they haven't.

And finally, we have one tomato growing on a vine.

Hopefully, we'll have more coming soon!

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