Is it really Day 6 already?  Time flies when you’re having fun.

This morning we woke up in Gettysburg, PA, in a nearly-empty motel.  As the woman in the breakfast area said, “If you can handle the cold, this is a great time to visit Gettysburg.”  Apparently it’s much more crowded in the summer, especially around July 4.  I think we were the only ones doing the audio driving tour, so it was nice not to fight traffic, and the brand-new visitors center was very un-crowded as well, just the way we like it.  The kids tolerated the 1.5-hour audio tour pretty well, but they thought the film and cyclorama at the visitor center were too loud.  (At least three of the four did.  Our little history buff just ate it all up.)

Then we had to decide which factory tour we wanted to do–pretzels or potato chips–and ended up at a very informative and kid-friendly tour of the Utz potato chip plant.  We had our first “small-world” experience as we ran into a little girl, there with her grandparents, from North Dakota, and we actually knew someone in common.  Those coincidences are always fun.

Since Gettysburg and the pretzel factory took longer than anticipated, and we soon figured out that traffic around York and Lancaster was not moving quickly, so we eliminated our last planned stop and headed for the hotel.  We’re staying at a great place except that the hotel has rendered the A/V jacks on the TV useless, so I can’t plug in the iPod to play a movie for the kids as we had planned.  We popped some popcorn anyway.

We thought we had brought in everything from the car, but somehow had missed the bedtime-story books, so bedtime reading tonight was a few pages from their Lincoln Highway guidebooks.  A little extra history never hurt anyone, I guess.

My challenge for the next two days–to find things that are open on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  I have some ideas up my sleeve but I’m not revealing anything yet.  If I’ve learned one thing on this trip, it’s that we’re not buying advance tickets to any anything because we never know when our plans are going to change.

We also may have hit our first biggish packing problem.  We remembered all the winter gear but left raincoats and umbrellas at home.  Rain in December never occurred to us, but it’s in the forecast for tomorrow.

“Santa” also needs to find some wrapping paper for those last small gifts that made the trip with us!

Next: Day 7

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