After yesterday’s ride, Pat and I decided we really needed a day to organize ourselves for a trip into Washington D.C. I haven’t mentioned much about it on the blog, but we’re going into Washington D.C. to attend the annual scientific sessions conference of the American Diabetes Association.

I’ll be spending part of June 10 through June 12 (about four hours each day) in the Bayer HealthCare booth at the conference. I’ll be there to talk with people and answer questions about The Dream Tour and the Bayer Dream Fund. When I’m not at the conference, Bayer HealthCare has been generous enough to leave free so I can do some sightseeing in Washington D.C.

This is a fabulous opportunity for Pat and me because we’ll get a chance to tell a lot of conference-goers about The Dream Tour and the Bayer Dream Fund, but also because neither of us has ever been to Washington D.C. We’re both looking forward to being in D.C., but we’re not looking forward to getting there. We have to drive ourselves in the minivan, with the bikes on the back, to the hotel where we’re staying. Where are we staying? It would be too easy for us to stay in the suburbs somewhere, of course, so we’re staying at the JW Marriott at 1331 Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s a short sprint on a bicycle to the White House and the National Mall and all the sights that Pat and I have talked about wanting to see.

Anyway, that’s all tomorrow. This morning, when we woke up in Frederick, Maryland, we decided not to ride today, but rather to get ourselves organized before heading in to D.C. on June 9. We needed to do laundry, wash the car, get myself a haircut, get a street map of D.C., and buy myself a pair of black dress pants (part of the official dress code for Bayer at the conference). But Frederick didn’t really have any appeal to it, at least not the area where we were staying. So, we decided we would pick up and move somewhere else. Pat had the great idea that if we were moving, we might as well move somewhere that we could do some sightseeing. We thought about heading back to Harper’s Ferry or to Antietam, but when we realized that Gettysburg was only a short 40 miles away, we decided to go there.

So today, we spent the morning doing all those chores that I mentioned earlier. Then, this afternoon, we visited the Gettysburg National Cemetery and did the driving tour of the battlefield.

Here’s a link to a selection of the photos I took during our tour today. I’ve added some details to the descriptions on most of them:

Gettysburg Tour Photos

The cemetery is a sobering experience. Close to 7000 veterans are buried there, 3600 of them are Civil War soldiers who died at Gettysburg. When you think that this is ONLY about 7 percent of the total casualties in three days of fighting at Gettysburg, you begin to realize the scale of the battles that occurred there.

I won’t even try to retell the history of the Battle of Gettysburg here. First, because in our four hour tour, we only scratched the surface of what happened here, and second, because there are a number of other web sites dedicated to Civil War history that do a much better job of retelling this history than I ever could. For those of you who might be interested, here are a few links that I’ve collected:

• National Park Service, Gettysburg National Cemetery
• National Park Service, Gettysburg National Military Park
• Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation
• Gettysburg.com, a site dedicated to all the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg.
• Roly’s Gettysburg Website, stories and information from a New Zealander who traveled half-way around the world to participate in a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Official Gettysburg Reenactment Website
• Battle of Gettysburg Official Records and Battle Description

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 5:03 am and is filed under The Dream Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.