Vacation Recap Part II: Dauphin, Harrisburg & Gettysburg, PA

I am continuing on our recap of our vacation last week. If you want to, you can catch up on Part I.

We arrived at our vacation rental at about nine or ten at night on Sunday night. It was an interesting entrance because it was on a river, down a river road, in the dark and everything looked a little creepy. {I'm pretty sure we all thought this, not just me.} We figured out which house was ours and low and behold, the owners popped out from where they stay in the converted garage guesthouse. My mother-in-law knew that they would be close by and normally would not be okay with this, but she seemed fine. They greeted us, told us a few things about the area and about the house and then we went about settling in for the night.

The next morning we got up to go grocery shopping. Each of us had a part of the list and grabbed what we needed. My brother-in-law was instructed to buy wine and I had never seen anything like this before. The wine was in a thing that looked like a giant vending machine and he had to put in his driver's license, take a breath-a-lizer and pay for the wine all at this machine. And there was a video there watching him. It was very strange.

We headed back to the house to relax for the rest of the afternoon. On family vacations we can be found doing a lot of this:

And this:

We are playing poker in these pictures even though it is hard to tell. We also play Monopoly. {Which, cough, cough, I won this time.}

Everyone went out in kayaks one day. I stayed back but they had a great time and discovered a rope swing and decided we would float the river one day, which we did and loved.

The second full day in Pennsylvania we went to the National Civil War Museum. It was really interesting and we spent about a half day there. We toured the Harrisburg, PA because a couple of weeks before we had arrived, there had actually been a tornado on the river we were staying on. There was quite a bit of damage and a lot of huge trees had fallen through homes. Very scary. The owners of the house we stayed in were very thankful to not have much damage to their home or property.

On Wednesday, which also happened to be my birthday, we headed to Gettysburg. The owners of the house let us borrow their audio tour CD to listen to in the car. This was definitely ideal as it was going to be about 97 degrees that day. That might be everyday normalcy to our San Antonian family, but to us Washingtonians, that is foreign! Anyway, travelling around in the car the narrator chronicled the battle of Gettysburg and where what happened. It was a pretty cool way to see the vast space that the battle took over.

Entering

Some battleground

Battle monument

Hub acting like he can shoot a canon

Gettysburg was a pretty overwhelming place to think of all this land that was just being fought on and all the deaths and Americans that fought in the Civil War. Seeing the space definitely put things into perspective.

We headed home after Gettysburg and got in the river a little bit since it was so hot outside. After that we all kind of relaxed and my brother-in-law made us barbecue chicken pizza. We celebrated my birthday where I got a couple of Kindle giftcards from my brothers-in-law for my Kindle that my parents got me and a Nordstrom giftcard from my parents-in-law. Very great!

Thursday was a really fun day where the owner of the house took us up river and we floated down. The float took about three hours which was just enough time for us all to get some color. It was really relaxing and a great way to spend the last day of our time in Pennsylvania before we hit the Big City...

Stay tuned...