Weekend Trip to Fredrick, Maryland

Last weekend, I picked Kelly up from work, we stopped by home for our stuff and the store for some Pepsi and we hit the road! We just went about 70 minutes west of Baltimore to Fredrick, MD. We stayed at a Best Western and ate delicious Indian food and just had a fun night walking around Fredrick. It is a cute town! It was nice to get away and not think of students or lesson planning or the vice-principal one single time!

Western Maryland is so pretty!

The next day we headed back to downtown Fredrick and went to a Civil War Medicine museum. (No photography allowed there, so no pictures yet.) Unfortunately, we got there a little too early, so the museum wasn't open yet. We walked up and down the main drag and enjoyed the window displays. Then we went to the museum. It was actually really interesting. I learned a lot, but the coolest thing is this: In history, Civil War doctors are always portrayed as butchers who just hacked off limbs no matter what. Well, there were a lot of amputations going on, but that really was the best thing they could do to save the soldiers' lives because the lead balls that they were shot with would penetrate deep and then smash against the bone, mangling the bone and flattening the minnie ball. Gangrene was almost sure to get you, too, so really, there was no saving the limb. So really, amputating is tough, but it ended up saving a lot of lives. I kind of knew all that stuff before, but I didn't know that amputation was the best thing to do. I just thought it was the quickest and easiest.

After the museum we went to Antietam. It was pretty cool. I'm not very good at my Civil War history, so I don't know much about it other than it was the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, so I didn't get much from all the signs saying this is where such-and-such happened. But we checked out all the memorials and read all the signs and I kind of liked just looking out on the hills and trying to imagine all those soldiers fighting and dying there. It was hard to imagine such a bloody thing happening at such a beautiful place.

(Random-Cool fact #1: I wear my hair curly now pretty much all the time. My straight hair probably won't make many reappearances until I'm back in Utah. :( I miss it....Utah and straight, shiny hair.)


We also checked out a cemetery, which was really beautiful and peaceful.
(Random-cool fact #2: I took this picture to show my Utah friends & family what Maryland "mountains" look like. They're HUGE!)


The real thing we went to Western Maryland for was to hike part of the Appalachian Trail. I think we ended up going about a week too early to see all the trees changing. Things were still pretty green, but there was some beautiful orange and yellow too. The drive up there was gorgeous. It was nice to hike, though. (It was kind of more of a walk without pavement, but that's okay. As you saw in the picture, the mountains here are kind of....lacking.) The day was beautiful and Kelly and I just talked the whole 6 or 7 miles. It was so fun to spend the whole day with him!
(Random-Cool face #3: I took a picture a lot like this one of my dad on top of Angel's Landing in Zion National Park around this time last year. Click to see it! If it's too big to see right, try right-clicking and going down to "view image" It worked for me, anyway.)

At the overlook that we made our turning back point




When we got back to the car, we ate some sandwiches and then headed back to Baltimore and lesson planning and students and Michael's and Mrs. Cooper, but we had such a wonderful weekend, we were okay with going back to work.


The sunset was so beautiful on our way home, I thought it was a very fitting end to our wonderful weekend trip.