Strong finish for the road and a history lesson.

I'm finally feeling like I've got something in the legs. After going through several weeks of dealing with some health issues dealing with fatigue, the body feels like it's responding. Last week, I got some really good cross training in. I was riding the bike around Gettysburg and then jumped in with the Boy Scouts hike around the battlefield. I caught up with them after I'd done about 25 miles. They were about halfway thru their hike and were at Devil's Den on their lunch break. As long as we were on the road, I was on the bike, but once on trails between Little and Big Round Tops and then the fields back up through the left side of the Confederate lines on the battle field, I had the bike shouldered. I road the couple miles to the starting point of Pickett's charge. I acted as a communications man between the front and back of the scout troop as a few had gone on ahead and then a couple stayed back with the stragglers. After having a tough time in the mud coming down from Big Round Top, my boy Ryan got his second wind and was making a point of staying near the front. The battlefield hasn't changed much since I saw it as a kid though they did have a new Visitor and Museum center. It was good to get both my boys in for a bit of education on one of this countries most prolific battles and have them understanding why the conflict was taking place. The final leg of the hike was retracing the steps of Pickett's charge and we were most of the way across when one of the scout leaders realized he'd lost his phone. I hopped back on the bike and took the roadway back to where he figured he'd lost it. A couple other tourists saw me riding by and had found the phone flagged me down and was asking me if I was with the scout group who'd lost the phone. That made looking for it easy. After retrieving the phone, I got back to the start of the charge trail through the field again and I ran the whole way. It's hard to imagine what it's like to do this in a battle. I was trotting my bike and a few extra pounds of stuff in a backpack. The soldiers that did this were marching across with their guns, haversacks, canteens and in uniforms. To top that off, cannons that were firing canister shot (old era version of machine gun fire), and infantry volleys were sending a shower of metal that knocked most of these men down by the time they got across. In the time it took to cross the field which for me was about 6 minutes, for the charging rebels, I would imagine it was around 15 minutes, over 5000 men fell. That is a very sobering thought. In dealing with any of the conflicts that we are faced with in the world, I think it is best to remember the words of Robert E. Lee when it comes to armed conflict: 'It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it.'