Boys’ trip to Lancaster/Gettysburg, day 1

We got dealt a few weather related lemons today but we all adapted and went with the flow. Seems in fact that both halves of the CCNF Lutz clan ran smack dab into weather events regardless of where we traveled to. Jen and the gang just beat nasty weather into Nebraska on Wednesday, while the boys and I, along with their grandfather (my dad) Chris, arrived in Lancaster County, PA late last night just in time for there to be flash flood warnings (and now tornado!) in the general vicinity. Yippee!

We started the day today at the famous Central Market, the country’s oldest farmer’s market in Lancaster proper. Pretty cool place. Everything from produce, to farm raised meats, to hand made Amish quilts, and most anything you can think of in between including several booths selling what looked like some really interesting middle eastern and Thai food. I couldn’t help but notice that the emergency defibrillator was kept right next to the booth of one of the German delis. Everything has its price, right?

We then jumped back into our car and headed off to the visitor center and museum at the Gettysburg National Military Park, which was one of the primary goals of this trip as well as the major reason I got out of hauling alpacas for 26 hours earlier this week. With the sky having opened up and a full on downpour outside, the boys (now 10 and just of 13) were remarkably tolerant of their father and grandfather taking them through the museum and stopping to look at most of the displays. Thankfully in this day and age there is quite a lot of interactive material to take in as well so they really held up well quite for the better part of our time there. Enough was enough though! Sam announced as we were heading to to the cafeteria to grab a late lunch that he and his dyslexia had had quite enough of reading the descriptions in the display cases after 3+ hours. It was a great beginning to our little adventure here in Gettysburg though. In any case like all good major hotel chains our’s here has that ever-present carrot on a stick that I was able to keep in front of my kids earlier today when their shoulders started to sag just a bit: the hotel pool.