Friday after we visited Arlington, we skipped over to Alexandria and toured the house and grounds of George Washington's plantation, Mount Vernon. It's located on the banks of the Potomac River and is so beautiful! We were lucky that we went on Friday and only had a short wait. We weren't able to take pictures inside, but the house is beautiful.
This is the view from the back patio. Beautiful!
We did A LOT of walking on Friday. Oaklie was dragging along but wouldn't let me carry her. I asked her if she was tired and she kicked one foot up and said, "My toesies are tired." She is such a ham!
A statue from inside the museum.
This quote is for my dad!
Here are some of the gorgeous views of the river we saw on our drive back to Leesburg.
Saturday was rainy and cold, so we decided to do some sightseeing from our car and headed a couple hours up north to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The battleground there is huge! Over three days of fighting, roughly 53,000 soldiers were killed. It was hard to picture such beautiful ground literally bathed in blood.
There were many, many different memorials there. One for each state and one for each battalion that fought in Gettysburg. Here is Virginia's monument. Our current "adopted" state :)
We climbed up a large tower to see a 360 degree view of the battlefield. I'm more than a little scared of heights, but Amaya held my hand the whole way :)
Views from the top.
Love my hair in this picture!
Of course Oaklie, our little daredevil, wanted to lean over the edge
We also got a quick peek at the Gettysburg Cemetery where many of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg were buried. This was the location of President Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address.
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
Abraham Lincoln
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