Our return trip does have a few days with an event planned, but mostly we are making tracks as fast as possible toward home. If you’ve traveled by bike you know that any stop is a 20 minute or more adventure of removing gear, doing whatever you stopped for, and donning gear again. You can easily consume a half hour just getting gas, using the boys room, drinking a bottle of water and getting going again. The point is, time is not your friend on these long hauls. Because of this, we won’t be stopping for sighting seeing much at all.
Today, however, was an exception. We planned to make a short stop at Gettysburg to snap some photos of the General Slocum statue. I’m not sure of the exact lineage, but Dad says he’d fall into the category of cousin. Can’t say how many times removed, it’s been several generations since the Civil War. We’ll just call him Cousin Slocum.
We stopped first at the Visitor’s Center hoping to catch a quick movie or some other interpretive experience but found the place is so commercialized that not even our National Parks Pass garnered us admittance to anything. So, we did what all consumer conditioned Americans do… we stopped by the Gift Shop to see what we they might have that we “needed” to take home. We also snagged a bite of over-priced lunch. With map in hand, we set off to find Cousin Slocum.
Wow! He’s huge. I was very surprised to find that we had “giantism” in our family genes. 🙂 Actually, he was just created that way. History books indicate General Slocum was somewhat of a shorter man. I don’t find that very surprising, most of the Slocum’s I know come in around 5’8″. One of the plaques on his statue gave his full list of military assignments. I found it pretty cool that both he and I were Field Artillery. Redleg must run deep in us.
Stopping at Gettysburg added a good number of miles and time to our journey. We slowed down to a near crawl for the last 40 miles of our journey as we were in a torrential thunderstorm complete with lighting. God saw fit to route the lighting away from our route, but it filled the sky magnificently, while the rain assaulted all of our waterproof gear searching for any weakness. We both arrived with wet spots on clothing and inside boots where the rain successfully penetrated our defenses.
Regardless of the rain, we had reason to be grateful. We made it safely to our destination without injury and our machines are in great working order with the rubber side down and the shiney side up.
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