2015 Travel Recap: Gettysburg National Military Park

*See my first travel recap, about our trip to Hawaii, here!*

Welcome to part two of my 2015 travel recap: our trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the infamous and horrifically bloody four-day Civil War battle and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We spent a day and a half here on our way to New York City at the end of May. My husband, Jarrod, grew up in rural Florida and is a huge Civil War buff, so I had a built-in guide for our tour around the battlefields.

My favorite part of the trip was having a Victorian photo taken! The folks at Victorian Photography Studio actually do authentic tin types and I would've loved to have one of those, but we were super stretched for time and had to opt for a regular digital photo. It was still so fun to dress up in period costumes. We look pretty good in our mid-1800s garb, huh?

The picture of Jarrod in the red shirt in front of a field is where the first shots of the Battle of Gettysburg were fired, which is how we started off our driving tour. I like history for sure -- I was a history minor in college -- but the Civil War isn't one of the time periods I'm most interested in. But I really enjoyed our trip here, and I learned a lot. It was sobering, though, to think about how many men died there -- more than any other battle of the Civil War. The very ground I was standing on had been covered in blood and bodies of fathers, brothers and sons.

I'd only been to Pennsylvania once before, for a quick trip to Philadelphia, and I was surprised how beautiful the area around Gettysburg was. Lots of green rolling hills, trees and wildflowers.