Gettysburg

We've been to Gettysburg before, and wandered the battlegrounds with taped autotours, watched the battle reenacted in the great little electric show in town, climbed the tower, visited the Cyclorama. But we had never visited the Eisenhower farm, and after the delightful visit to the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene last year, it was the main attraction for us for this year's visit. It turned out the Cyclorama has been restored and moved since our last visit, and now rests in the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center, newly built in 2008, and now the terminus for all National Park tours in Gettysburg.

This is pretty much where the action begins in Gettysburg.

At the visitor center we bought a throw away camera, since Mary F.'s brand new Samsung that we bought just before her 50th high school reunion, was damaged by a leaking kitchen ceiling, and--not knowing that--we had left our old digital camera at the hotel. Stuff happens.

My bride boarding the bus. She let me come, too.

You can't drive to the Eisenhower farm. Mamie left strict instructions that the property wouldn't be paved over for parking. So we boarded the tour bus and rode past the sites of such intense history as Pickett's Charge, and the site of Eisenhower's first assignment, in 1917, command of a Tank Corp training facility next to the cemetery where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address only 54 years earlier, to the modest farm the soon-to-be President and First Lady bought in 1949 for $44,000.

The modest home of a President. The third section from the left is original to the

eighteenth century; the other parts had to be rebuilt in 1949.

The barn adjacent to the house was for cows, farm equipment and storage of Eisenhower's vehicles: a Chrysler Imperial limousine circa 1954; a Buick wagon; a Crosley runabout, and several golf carts. Eisenhower's life was so busy that he never had a driver's license until leaving the Presidency.

The original barn.

An end-view of the barn shows the milk room on the end, which was converted to Secret Service quarters in 1965, after the Kennedy assassination changed the rules about post-presidential protection.

The Eisenhower barn was red when he bought it, but the the President though that was to ostentatious.

We weren't able to take pictures in the house with a flash--and the disposable camera we had bought didn't know when not to--but we were surprised at the modesty of it, considering leaders from all over the world were entertained there during and after the Eisenhower presidency. Mamie liked pink just a bit too much for my taste.

As a kid of the forties and fifties, Eisenhower was a hero of mine and a million other kids, and my dad, an Army Air Corps veteran, idolized him. He's still my favorite president, a moderate, intelligent man--completely unlike the blowhards, nitwits and corporate pimps who represent the Republican party today; aw, gee, is my politics showing?--who was a 5-star general but as president never lost a soldier's life or an inch of ground on his watch.

Mary F. appreciates a rose behind the Eisenhower house--a bit of rain was falling.

In his final years Ike spent what time the public allowed him to be alone developing soil conservation methods on the property he bought, with the simple idea that he wanted to leave a piece of the earth better than when he found it.

Upon our return to the Visitor's Center and a couple of films about the Civil War and a re-acquaintance with the Cyclorama, it was mid-afternoon and time for...lunch!

We had overheard one of the tour guides waxing eloquently about the finest French onion soup in the land, available at Dobbin House Tavern, a historic building which was built in 1776 and served as the manse of Rev. Dobbin of Ireland, and later as his classical school and since the Civil War a tavern much as today. My bride proved the tour guide right, and washed down la spécialité de la maison with cider laced with buttered rum. My lunch was equally délicieux: crab bisque with two pumpkin martinis!

Mary F. in front of Dobbin House Tavern

It was time to head back to our hotel in Chambersburg, twenty-five miles west. But along the way we couldn't help but pay a call at the Adams County Winery, housed in a red barn near Cashtown, where R. E. Lee gathered his troops prior to the assault on Gettysburg:

We found the Adams County Winery--the only patrons!

After a quick taste-testing I bought a couple of dry reds, one called Rhedd Butler!, and Mary F. purchased everything pictured below:

Mary F. in a sippin' mood.

OK, just kidding. After sipping and spending, we headed once again for Chambersburg, but couldn't help but stop at Mister Ed's Elephant Museum, something you certainly wouldn't expect to see on a country road in Pennsylvania and I'm not really sure that we did:

Elephants, just not real ones. A pleasant stop, nonetheless.

There didn't seem to be any real elephants around, and we understand there was a bad fire there recently, but to their credit Mr. Ed's boasted one of the nicest stuffed-in-a-little-trailer candy store and fudge shops we've ever seen, and we left with half a pound of delicious pumpkin fudge. Gourd-gious.

Best fudge in a trailer, ever.

By now this old couple was ready for kicking back at the hotel with a chicken sandwich and some of our Adams County Winery treasures. But there was one more stop to make:

My two sweethearts. Both fun to take on vacations.

At a Rite-Aid on route 30 to turn our toss-away camera pix into a CD for this up-to-date report to our friends and family.

Not a bad first full day for our Autumn Adventure 2010. Tomorrow: Lexington and horse country.