Thursday, 17 June 2004

It's my birthday. I'm 45 today.

I'm writing this at the Fitness Center, while Jackie's in her class. I've already done my lifting (although I now realize that I forgot to do my stretching).

It's been a great birthday. Knowing her class would be today, Jackie made me my birthday dinner yesterday (chicken cordon bleu and chocolate cake) and we had our feast yesterday evening with Barbara. I went to work as usual today, but before that I opened my birthday presents. I got all sorts of great birthday loot.

We took quite a few pictures on the Gettysburg trip. Here are just a few, starting with me. Steven and I had bicycled along Cemetery Ridge, the site of where Pickett's Charge into the Union's prepared position was a bloody failure. We looked around, and noticed that there were paths mowed into the field. Then we observed that we had mountain bikes that could certainly handle the terrain. Without much further thought, we headed across the field.

This picture was taken at roughly the halfway point. It's not obvious in the picture, but it was really muddy.

The driving tour runs people in cars along Seminary Ridge, and then back along Cemetery Ridge. You can look across, but that doesn't provided nearly the sense of what the distance and the terrain are that actually crossing the field does.

Photo credit goes to Steven Brewer

Close by where Steve took that picture, I took this one, of what I immediately dubbed "Pickett's Fence."

We got a bunch of pictures of monuments, statues, battlefields-in-the-mist, etc., which I won't bore you with. Instead, I'll bore you with a couple of pictures of the Brewer family.

Here's a picture of most of us, taken when the people who were driving joined up with the people who were bicycling. The back row has Steven, Jackie, me, and Lucy. The front row has Steven's sons Charlie and Daniel and their mom Alisa. For this one, Steven shares photo credit with his camera's automatic timer.

The site here is a monument with an "eternal flame" that we meant to get back to in the evening, when we thought we might be able to get a good picture of the flame itself, but never did.

Finally, here's a picture taken a day or two later, after my dad and his wife Katy arrived. We're all hiking a path up Big Round Top. That's Katy, Richard, Jackie, Steven, and Lucy.

I got a tiny bit of writing done, having spent most of my time on the pictures for this journal entry.