Thanksgiving Travels

We typically spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family and head north to visit James's family for New Year's.  This year, we headed to Virginia to celebrate James's brother's wedding and stayed to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family. 

My cousin/BFF also lives in Virginia, so we got to spend time with her as

well.  She is always up for fun, so when I mentioned that I had been wanting to visit Gettysburg for years, we decided to make the trip!  

We started with a stop at the Appalachian Brewing Company for lunch.  My cousin and I always get two items and share them, so we got a veggie burger with apples and cheddar and pretzels with ABC's beer cheese dip.  I washed mine down with a house-made ginger beer while Mary had the house root beer (and of course James had a pale ale).  Delicious!

Right after lunch, we headed to the Gettysburg visitor's center and museum.

It was bitter cold and incredibly windy, so we took an auto tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield and, sadly, didn't get out of the car much.  James and Mary's boyfriend were in charge of driving/directions, so Mary and I got to have tons of fun together being slightly crazy. :)

A lot of people tend to say that all battlefields look alike, but truly this one was different to me.  I loved driving through the old downtown and seeing important sites in the battle scattered all through Gettysburg.  The town and battlefield were so pretty.

We stopped by the amazingly handsome Virginia memorial...

and the site of Pickett's Charge.

I love seeing the Arkansas state memorials at battlefields (even though I don't know of any family that actually joined the fight from Arkansas).

We were lucky enough to still be in the park at sunset.  It was absolutely beautiful.

We finished up our visit at the Soldiers' National Cemetery.  I've always been very fascinated and moved by cemeteries and this one was no different.

Solemn.  Poignant.

Beautiful.

In between Gettysburg, beer, shopping (there is a Kate Spade outlet in Leesburg, VA!), and visiting with family...We also made time to stop by Ben's Chili Bowl in D.C. 

  

We shared the famous half-smoke with chili and chili-cheese fries.  YUM.

James had been wanting to visit for a while after reading about it and seeing it on TV, so this year's trip felt like a mission accomplished for both of us!