July 7th, we FINALLY went to watch the Gettysburg reenactment! I've been wanting to do this since we moved to Philadelphia and have begged Kevin every year...but something always comes up the week we want to go.
This year I was determined to make it work since I was unsure when or if we would ever get to do this again. So we bought our tickets and packed our stuff to head to the reenactment. The weather said it would be hot that day, so we packed a bunch of frozen water bottles, sunscreen, bug spray, binoculars, our cameras and our camp chairs.
I drove the 3 hrs there so Kevin could study for boards in the car. Although I have learned that when Kevin says he is going to study in the car, he ends up being my back seat driver instead. ;) He did get a little bit of studying done though.
The first thing we did when we got there was try to find a decent spot to plant our camping chairs because we heard it was hard to get a spot. Fortunately, we got a GREAT spot and were able to see everything. Unfortunately, it was the HOTTEST day we've had so far. Our frozen water bottles did not last us long at all. We ended up having to fork out a bunch of money throughout the day to buy water to keep us hydrated and we were sweating like crazy! In fact, most of the pictures we took I looked horrible because I was sweating so much! I was a little worried about Kevin at one point because he was falling asleep during some of the discussions in the tents in between fighting. I don't think we would have stayed as long as we did if we had kids! They also had to post pone the last battle in the evening because it was so hot. They didn't want their actors to get dehydrated!
For the most part, we just stayed under the main tents and listened to discussions about Gettysburg and that time period. We watched a "wedding" from that time, listened to stories about spies (that was my favorite), and Ghost stories about Gettysburg. We also listened to stories from some of the Generals and their take on the war.
Besides listening to discussions, we walked around for a bit (we tried no to walk around too much because it was so stinkin' hot...it seriously drained you to move.) and looked at all sorts of shops and other things in the tents. They had a "surgeon" from that time period in his own tent and you could talk to him about the stuff they did back then. I was amazed at some of the General's tents! They had old furniture in there and everything! It was pretty neat!
The battles were awesome! It was moving. Next year, will be the 150th anniversary so they plan on having 15,000 actors reenact the battles. I'm kind of bummed I am going to miss that.
Anyway, I didn't want to spend a ton of time editing pictures and loading them on here so I just put them all on a video so you could see our trip! I couldn't figure out what music to put on there, so don't judge.
Below is a video of one of the actors talking about her role as a spy as well. It was really interesting!
2 comments:
How cool! I don't think I could ever get Shilo to go to something like that. You guys are so lucky to be able to go see so many historical things.
Looks like fun! And I can just image how hot it was with the humidity...
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