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Today the goal was to get to Washington DC, but in a roundabout way, by first going west into West Virginia, then through southern Pennsylvania and finally south through Maryland.

The day started off by going through the mountains of West Virginia which provided many amazing views, although after seeing mountains in Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and elsewhere, I have to say West Virginia seemed to have just big hills Regardless, it was still great to see. I then drove to the college town of Morgantown and Foodio54 recommended Mountaineer Pizza. The pizza was pretty good, which is probably easy to expect of pizza place with competition for lots of hungry college students. After eating I headed through a bit of Maryland before going into southern Pennsylvania.

I’ve been trying to visit places of historical interest in addition to ones of culinary interest, and it seemed appropriate to visit the Flight 93 Memorial outside of Shanksville, PA. This is the location where United 93, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, was crashed when the passengers figured out what was going on and tried to retake the plane in midair. I’ve been here several times before actually, however always on or within a day or so of 9/11, and I was really surprised by how many people were there today. When I first arrived there were probably 40 or 50 people and then just before the park ranger started to tell the story of what happened a bus pulled up with another several dozen people. Right now they still have a temporary memorial, although they said that the new permanent memorial will be started this November, and they hope to have it mostly finished by 9/11/2011. The site of the crash itself is off limits for now, and is a few hundred yards from the memorial demarked by a fence bearing an American flag, the permanent memorial will allow visitors to get much closer to the actual crash site. The temporary memorial has benches with the names of all of the passengers and crew along with various plaques and a wall of items left by visitors.

After the Flight 93 memorial I headed east to Gettysburg, for another historical site. Gettysburg has simply too much to see in the very small time I had available before sunset. I had a general idea of how the battlefield was setup, however I at first I could not figure out where the Union line was as I kept on finding Confederate historical markers. Then I remember that this was mixed up and the south attacked from the north west and the north defended the south east and everything was much easier to find Because I had to be very selective of what I would see I decided I would try to find the spot where in the movie Gettysburg the unit that was primarily followed in the movie (the 20th Maine) was ordered to hold the extreme left of the line and ran out of ammunition causing their commander to order a bayonet charge to stop the Confederates from flanking the line. On an off note, for proof that Jeff Daniels is the best actor ever watch Gettysburg immediately before watching Dumb & Dumber He has quite the range of characters Basically I knew that this took place on little round top and that was it, so I used my iPhone to pull up a map of the battlefield and once I had identified where I was it was pretty easy to find. The site had just a simple marker, and another set of markers explaining what had happened. I then found my way up to the top of the little round top hill and the sun set which was my que to get moving to DC. I had planned on eating in Gettysburg, although unfortunately everything seemed to be closed.

Tags: Big Road Trip