Get Thee to Gettysburg

Kevin says...

Well, we managed to convince Riley to play hooky yesterday (which took a ton of convincing, as you can imagine); and instead of going to work and school, we decided to pull a Fievel and head west.

Athennia's car seems to have a knack for decommissioning one of its O2 sensors every time we take a road trip of any sort; so our first order of business was to stop by Enterprise and pick up a rental for the day.

Enterprise, for their part, had promised us a "Nissan Rogue or equivalent"—which was fine with us as long as the hypothetical "equivalent" didn't turn out to be anything manufactured by General Motors, which we would not have considered equivalent in even the most remote sense.

Crisis was averted, however, when the guy behind the counter led us outside to give us a choice between a 2023 Rogue and a 2024 Hyundai Tucson.

Alrighty then—BLAM!

And just like that, we were off... albeit with a Florida license plate...

...which meant that, at first glance, everyone behind us for the rest of the day would inevitably have the same thought...

Ah, Florida?! Is this some 96-year-old Gladys or Bartholomew doing 26mph in the fast lane?

...until they realized they realized they were eating our dust—at which point they would change their tune real quick...

Man, LOOK at those Floridians! They're just drivin' whatever speed they want! They must love freedom—I'll bet they didn't even get locked in their homes for two years to "flatten the curve" during the scamdemic!

As it turned out, the Sunshine State is no match for Trenton smog...

But luckily there was a clear patch of sky to lead us toward the Promised Land out in farm country...

...but there was also this black Lyriq with a Jersey plate in front of us—which, at this point right at the outset, we didn't yet know had been sent to pester us for our entire journey on the turnpike :/

But... STILL better than sitting through school all day; right, Molerat?

Who knew that the first day of November is National Drive Safely Day?

We encountered all sorts of characters. But nothing could top this guy...

Satellite radio pulled through with a decent '90s station so that neither Kitten nor I had to pair our phone with the rental car in order to listen to some good music. (That's a MAJOR security risk, for the record.)

Athennia dedicates Everclear's "Father of Mine" to her dad...

After more than a dozen instances of me insisting that we were crossing the Susquehanna River every time we drove over some measily little creek or stream, there was no denying it when we finally got there...

No Trenton smog out here!

Of course, even west of the Susquehanna, we still had to look at Jersey plates!

And this !@#$%^& Lyriq that had long since forgotten the words was still humming right along and blocking us in every time we caught up to another cluster of traffic!

It was almost over though: Once the air and the sky cleared up, we could feel that we were getting close! This sign was a pretty good indicator as well...

We made an obligatory pit stop in Dillsburg for... obvious reasons :)

And then we were back on the road—now wide-open and Lyriq-free :)

Devil Went Down to Georgia

And soon thereafter, we had reached our first destination...

"Whoa! Is this Devil's Den?!"

—probably someone

Nope! This is Sickles Avenue, kid.

Devil's Den is another 13 inches—THIS is Devil's Den.

It appeared that the Devil wasn't home.

He wasn't home the last time I was here in the mid-1990s either.

Lame.

At least the boulders were still here ;)

I'd actually been mildly worried that they wouldn't be as big as I remembered them as a little kid.

Boy, was that fear ever groundless: The cars look like ants...

Now enjoy an absolute wall of pictures of giant rocks, presented with absolutely no meaningful commentary whatsoever...

And here are the cannons...

See? I told you we'd get there eventually.

Little Round Top

I forget whether it was Kitten or the Molerat who first wondered what that little fort structure was at the top of the hill...

But we were doing great time-wise; and I assured them that we would definitely check that out after we finished not dying on the rocks.

So began the ascent!

The rest of my squad stopped to try to save a caterpillar...

...and were visibly fatigued halfway to the summit...

My inner Texan pressed onward, until...

And suddenly Devil's Den looked like an ant farm...

If a picture's worth 1,000 words, a video must be worth 1,000,000...

Then, having (barely) conquered Little Round Top, it was time to go lay waste to someplace else.

The Burg of Getty

Shoutout to Tommy's Pizza!

We did not take this photo: I grabbed it off of Google Maps. But Kitten and I had a wonderful ~25-minute conversation with this woman, who was very knowledgeable about the battlefield and regaled us with some great stories (both related and unrelated).

We walked out with a pretty good haul: some wall art, a few magnets, and three bottles of soda from a local brewery (that didn't last long enough for a photo-op)...

Upon leaving the gift shop, we passed through the heart of Gettysburg, where a bunch of people with no hopes, dreams, or hobbies were out protesting on the corner.

Here's this nutsack thinking he's the focus of my photo—when I was actually snapping Baltimore Barry in the Marylandmobile in front of us trying to figure out how roundabouts work...

Whew.

No wonder Baltimore's a cesspool, if that's any indication of the mean intellect there.

Biglerville: The Smaller, Quieterville

Soon we were in Biglerville—which is what my family has actually meant all my life when we said we were "going out to Gettysburg."

Traffic lights: 1

Total population: 15

Empty roads, breathable air, and endless expanses of green open spaces: Yes

We stopped at the cemetery...

...and Athennia and Riley came as close as they're going to get to meeting my dad...

Arrival!

Athennia says...

We got to Kevin's Aunt Jill and Uncle Terry's farm a little after 3:00. And just in the length of their driveway alone, we would've passed a Wal-Mart, two McDonald's, and a Dunkin back home.

Kevin pointed out a bunch of "landmarks" on the way back to the farmhouse:

Then we reached the house and Aunt Jill came out to greet us.

She called Terry out in the butcher shop to let him know we were here, and she let us know she had taken the liberty of harvesting a giant bag of potatoes for us earlier in the afternoon :)

Then Terry arrived on a 4-wheel drive golf cart and asked if we wanted him to show us around.

Tour of the Farm

Moose wanted to come too, and he and Riley called shotgun :)

It sure was a beautiful day, and easy to see why they call it Sunny Mountain Farm :)

It was basically "pick whatever you can carry":

I have to say, all the pictures I've seen over the years of the average person's imagination of an apple tree did not prepare me for how many apples are actually on a single apple tree!

Terry said they had just dug up the potatoes that morning and would be collecting them tomorrow:

And after a full tour of the fields and the orchards, we were back at the barns and the butcher shop:

Aunt Jill mentioned that Kevin's cousin Becky's cat was living in their barn now because it had recently started peeing on all Becky's furniture.

Naturally, like any time there's an animal within a quarter mile, Riley insisted on meeting it. We found a tick on the cat, which I thought I could remove with some dental floss, but then in the midst of trying I decided to stop because I could tell I was causing the cat too much pain :(

Farm to Table

Aunt Jill cooked an entire farm-fresh meal for us, complete with their beef, their potatoes, their corn, their peaches, and their applesauce made from 100% apples!

And then chocolate cake with cherry topping for dessert :)

Uncle Terry has some of the wildest stories I've ever heard. And Aunt Jill filled us in on the rest of Kevin's dad's family that we don't see all that regularly anymore.

We stayed and visited until after 10:00 in the evening, at which point Kevin and I lamented that we had a 2+ hour drive back, and still had to return the rental.

And we weren't sure whether the road we planned to take back to the highway would even be open, because Terry had been receiving reports of an 11 acre fire nearby all evening long!

Hitting the Road

After saying our goodbyes we loaded all our produce into the trunk of the Tucson (and remarked how fortunate it was that we had splurged for an SUV!)

Then Aunt Jill came whizzing by on the golf cart and told us to wait because she had something for us. (Like several hundred dollars worth of produce isn't enough??)

She drove off and disappeared into the shadows, because unlike back home, it actually gets dark out here, and then she came back a few minutes later with a bag full of stuff from the butcher shop!

And then we were on our way, fingers crossed that the one way we knew how to get home would be accessible (since even with the help of GPS you can't exactly just hang any old left or right out here and hope to go a few blocks and then cut back over to where you were.)

There were fire engines everywhere and we did come to a Road Closed sign. So we stopped and rolled down the window, and I could hear Kevin throw up in his mouth a little bit as he said to one of the firefighters,

We're from Trenton, New Jersey and we're trying to get back to Route 15 to get home. Can we get through this way?

The guy told us no problem and pointed to the fire all the way at the top of a mountain out in the distance (which we had of course already seen in the pitch darkness by that point).

And so a short time later we were back on the turnpike and headed back East.

At one point we heard a strange pop and then noticed that the truck in front of us (packed to the gills with big bales of hay) was throwing sparks everywhere from its back left tires!

So we, um, passed that guy.

And then I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, so we pulled into a rest area so we could grab some coffee.

None of us had ever seen a turnpike 7-Eleven before:

Nor did we have any intention of stepping foot in one, until we got inside the rest area to find that Dunkin, BK, and Baskin Robbins were all closed.

That left 7-Eleven smiling victoriously at us and seemingly asking,

So what're you gonna do now?

But actually, this was clean and brightly lit and unlike any Sev we'd ever been in before. So it wasn't a big deal after all :)

And the coffee gave us the alertness we needed to get the rest of the way home safely and wide awake.

We pulled into the bar parking lot next to my car and conducted the most boring drug deal of all time as we transferred all our goods from the Tuscon to my trunk.

Then we drove the Tuscon to Enterprise's lot next door and dropped the keys in their dropbox, and we were home safe about six minutes later.

Still had to carry eight metric tons of groceries up a flight of stairs though, which is always a fun thing to do around midnight!

But this is... I just have no words: