Greetings from Gettysburg!
Sep. 26th, 2023 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerGreetings from Gettysburg! I'm on the road again, first with a stop in Knoxville to see my pen pal Grace, with whom I visited a wolf-dog sanctuary (important PSA: do not get a wolf-dog hybrid for a pet! They make terrible pets!) where we saw the wolf-dogs frolicking in their enclosures, A+++, if you ever find yourself in Knoxville consider booking a tour.
ALSO we went to Sunday brunch at Ancient Lore Village, which basically looks like Hobbiton, a series of hobbit-holes built into the side of the soft sloping hills. You can rent them for the night, but can they possibly be as charming inside??? So we contented ourselves with the delicious brunch on the terrace overlooking the waterfall (manmade) and the mountains (which have been there since the beginning of time).
Next stop is New York City, but I've been taking my time about the drive. I left after lunch, intending to reach Gettysburg, but as a result of misadventures (read: getting tired of the interstate and mucking about on state roads for a while), I only made it to Harrisonburg. Often mucking about on the smaller roads leads to serendipitous discovers, but serendipity was not with me on that route... perhaps only because it was waiting, though, because that evening as I contemplated my route to Gettysburg, I noticed that a short detour would take me to the Luray Caverns.
And they are magnificent. You can walk through on your own, at your own pace, hovering over the perfectly still dream pool that reflects the tiny stalactites above so perfectly that it seems not a reflection at all, but a tiny city or a delicate forest of white spires and deep crags. The water itself is never more then a foot or so deep, but the reflections are far deeper, and at the edges sometimes those reflections seem to burrow under the rock.
And the white shining flowstone, which always looks wet; and the stubs of stalactites, broken off by long-ago tourists; and the ripples of rock, so like cloth, so thin that the light shines through them. The vast stalagmites like strange intricate wedding cakes or Towers of Babel, and the pillars where stalagmite and stalactite have met and melded together, and the ripples of the dripping water made rock.
And the Cathedral, where they once held dances, women in hoopskirts and music provided by the local band. Now there is an organ there, which "plays" the stalactites, a soft haunting sound in the quiet of the caves that are so silent that you can hear the water drip.
And it all gave me a story idea, or rather coalesced with an idea that I've been playing with, a retelling of Orpheus, and in the cave it seemed perfect, but later on when I tried to write it down it did not... we'll see if it comes back together.
The caverns were wonderful and absolutely worth it, but I wish I could have done Gettysburg properly too. As it was I got there too late to do the bus tour of the battlefield, which in any case I hadn't realized existed, as I didn't properly research this part of the trip at all. (There is of course a driving audio tour that you can do yourself, but I didn't feel like doing more driving.)
But I did get to visit the Cyclorama, a giant oil painting from the 1880s of the culminating moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, painted as if the viewer were standing atop Cemetery Ridge during Pickett's Charge. The painting is vast, stretching unbroken all around the inside of a cylindrical building, and nowadays there's a little sound and light show that comes with it, presumably because they don't trust the jaded modern viewer to appreciate the painting on its own.
But after the show there is a little time to just walk around and look, and see all the detail that Philippoteaux put in: a soldier on a stretcher, two soldiers helping a wounded comrade, the last skirmishes of Pickett's Charge, fighting in the Wheat Field.
There was a little exhibit outside about the history of the Cyclorama, which spent summers in Boston and Philadelphia and goodness knows where else before finally finding a permanent home in Gettysburg. They sold season tickets, and I understand why: you could spend hours in there finding new details that you'd never seen before.
Now onward to New York City! I have a reservation at Delmonico's and tickets to a talk of Jane Goodall's.
ALSO we went to Sunday brunch at Ancient Lore Village, which basically looks like Hobbiton, a series of hobbit-holes built into the side of the soft sloping hills. You can rent them for the night, but can they possibly be as charming inside??? So we contented ourselves with the delicious brunch on the terrace overlooking the waterfall (manmade) and the mountains (which have been there since the beginning of time).
Next stop is New York City, but I've been taking my time about the drive. I left after lunch, intending to reach Gettysburg, but as a result of misadventures (read: getting tired of the interstate and mucking about on state roads for a while), I only made it to Harrisonburg. Often mucking about on the smaller roads leads to serendipitous discovers, but serendipity was not with me on that route... perhaps only because it was waiting, though, because that evening as I contemplated my route to Gettysburg, I noticed that a short detour would take me to the Luray Caverns.
And they are magnificent. You can walk through on your own, at your own pace, hovering over the perfectly still dream pool that reflects the tiny stalactites above so perfectly that it seems not a reflection at all, but a tiny city or a delicate forest of white spires and deep crags. The water itself is never more then a foot or so deep, but the reflections are far deeper, and at the edges sometimes those reflections seem to burrow under the rock.
And the white shining flowstone, which always looks wet; and the stubs of stalactites, broken off by long-ago tourists; and the ripples of rock, so like cloth, so thin that the light shines through them. The vast stalagmites like strange intricate wedding cakes or Towers of Babel, and the pillars where stalagmite and stalactite have met and melded together, and the ripples of the dripping water made rock.
And the Cathedral, where they once held dances, women in hoopskirts and music provided by the local band. Now there is an organ there, which "plays" the stalactites, a soft haunting sound in the quiet of the caves that are so silent that you can hear the water drip.
And it all gave me a story idea, or rather coalesced with an idea that I've been playing with, a retelling of Orpheus, and in the cave it seemed perfect, but later on when I tried to write it down it did not... we'll see if it comes back together.
The caverns were wonderful and absolutely worth it, but I wish I could have done Gettysburg properly too. As it was I got there too late to do the bus tour of the battlefield, which in any case I hadn't realized existed, as I didn't properly research this part of the trip at all. (There is of course a driving audio tour that you can do yourself, but I didn't feel like doing more driving.)
But I did get to visit the Cyclorama, a giant oil painting from the 1880s of the culminating moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, painted as if the viewer were standing atop Cemetery Ridge during Pickett's Charge. The painting is vast, stretching unbroken all around the inside of a cylindrical building, and nowadays there's a little sound and light show that comes with it, presumably because they don't trust the jaded modern viewer to appreciate the painting on its own.
But after the show there is a little time to just walk around and look, and see all the detail that Philippoteaux put in: a soldier on a stretcher, two soldiers helping a wounded comrade, the last skirmishes of Pickett's Charge, fighting in the Wheat Field.
There was a little exhibit outside about the history of the Cyclorama, which spent summers in Boston and Philadelphia and goodness knows where else before finally finding a permanent home in Gettysburg. They sold season tickets, and I understand why: you could spend hours in there finding new details that you'd never seen before.
Now onward to New York City! I have a reservation at Delmonico's and tickets to a talk of Jane Goodall's.
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Date: 2023-09-26 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-09-27 12:43 am (UTC)Oooh!
tickets to a talk of Jane Goodall's
I'm so jealous!!!!! She was my idol as a kid.
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Date: 2023-09-27 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-09-27 06:31 pm (UTC).... I saw a cyclorama in the Boston area! But it wasn't displaying the battle of Gettysburg; it was showing a sea voyage around the world. It was wonderful, and I'm sure the Gettysburg one is, too.
My dad and mom visited the battlefield, and one thing that impressed my dad was how they keep it looking like it did back then--if the trees were saplings, then they don't let them grow beyond the sapling stage, etc.
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Date: 2023-09-27 09:14 pm (UTC)I didn't know that about the saplings! I wish I'd planned ahead enough to take the bus tour. But then there wouldn't have been time for the caves, and I loved the caves... oh well, as my dad commented, even on a two-month road trip there isn't time to do everything.
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Date: 2023-09-27 10:35 pm (UTC)And I was wrong about it being a cyclorama--it's just done as a long painting. But it was shown, originally, like a cyclorama (the little video on the website explains.)
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Date: 2023-09-28 09:48 pm (UTC)And TBH that looks like a painting that would be easier to take in as a cyclorama. There is simply so much painting!