Gettysburg!!

So last weekend on Friday we went out to a nice dinner at the Macaroni Grill because sometimes you just need a nice night out ya know?  Date nights on Fridays are always so refreshing and relaxing...my brain can calm down and its nice just to have fun and not think about school!

On Saturday we headed back to the Holocaust museum to finish it up.  It was way sad and took SO long to get through (like 3 hours even though we had already started the week before).  After that we headed over to the National History Museum.  We were way museumed out though so we kind of just walked through part of it and then left.  We did get to see the flag that was waving when Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner.  That was way cool!  We will have to go back later and finish.  Then we went to Costco yay!  I love Costco.  That was basically our whole weekend!  I don't have any pictures of it at all...awesome.

So THIS weekend...we went go Gettysburg!!  My BYU program was going and we weren't going to go because I'm still sick but then we decided to go!  So Friday we headed out to Fairfax on the metro and my adviser, Becky's husband came and picked us up.  Becky got us set up at a lady in her ward's empty apartment which was SO nice!  It was so so fun being in a 1 bedroom apartment...it felt like we were back in our Provo apartment!  We just miss having our own space you know?  It was so so nice spending the night there...made the whole trip worth it.  There was a giant teddy bear in there for some reason...so we got some pics with it.

Haha pretty funny.

So Saturday Becky picked us up in the morning and we headed first to Harpers Ferry which is this little town in West Virginia that has a ton of Civil War history surrounding it.  We learned all about this guy named John Brown who had a gang of slavery abolitionists and they all attacked Harpers Ferry to try and get all the slaves freed.  It was unsuccessful but it was a big move toward getting slavery abolished.  We learned a lot about the area and about a little college that was there.  It was really cool.  Here are some pictures of the town.

A cute little store

The town

Another view of the town with my head

Where the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers meet

Birds

It was really cold.  It was snowing.

Idk why but we thought this was funny

A picture of John Brown (real picture...jk)

Jefferson's Rock...where Thomas Jefferson liked to go because it had a beautiful view and you can see West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland all from up there.

The view

An old chapel that's there

It was a pretty cool place. 

Then we were off to Gettysburg! There was lots of driving yesterday.  First we went in an watched a movie about Gettysburg, then went into this circle room where there is a huge oil painting showing what the battle at Gettysburg looked like.  Then we walked through the whole museum which was awesome.  I didn't know very much about Gettysburg at all but these museums we get to go to are great because they teach me everything!  The Civil War was so stupid but so cool at the same time.  I learned a lot and loved it.

Ready for battle

That big painting in that circle room...crazy

 After the museum we went and did the driving tour around the fields of Gettysburg.  We listened to a CD that went through the details of what happened where.  It was awesome.

This is a picture looking down on Devil's field (or something, can't remember the name).  This is where thousands of people were killed.  It was said that there were so many bodies you had to walk on them to get around.

Cannons in the sunset

The Gettysburg Cemetery... for those who died during the 3 day battle

A castle thing...not sure what the purpose of this thing was but it was way cool so I went on the top to get a picture

And that about wraps it up!  The Civil war was really sad and devastating, but it is cool that it helped strengthen this nation and give us more of a strong desire for freedom and equality.  Slaves were freed as a result of the Civil War, but we are still working on equality in this country.  Crazy how it has taken hundreds of years for the ideas behind the Emancipation Proclamation and other documents to become more of a reality. 

After the car tour, we headed home!  What a great day spent in one of the most historic sites in American history.