Out East —> Summer 🚕☀️
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
Pittsburgh
Out East — Summer, 2016 🚕☀️⚾
Our 2016 family trip Out East was one of those wonderfully varied road trips where American history, baseball, college campuses, old friendships, and plenty of miles on the road all came together.
Baseball was definitely part of the itinerary. We caught a game in Pittsburgh, taking in the city and the atmosphere of beautiful PNC Park, with its unforgettable views across the Allegheny River toward downtown. Later, there was more baseball in Cincinnati, proving that apparently one ballpark on a family vacation simply wasn’t enough. Between games, we spent time with dear friends, making those visits some of the warmest and most memorable moments of the trip.
We also stopped at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with its handsome red-brick Georgian buildings and classic college-town setting—a quieter interlude between cities, ballparks, and the historic sites still ahead.
The trip then took us much further back into American history. At Antietam, Maryland, we walked the landscape where, on September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate armies fought the bloodiest single day in American military history. Roughly 75,000 Union troops faced about 38,000 Confederates. Although the battle itself is often considered tactically inconclusive, strategically it stopped Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North and gave President Abraham Lincoln the opportunity to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Standing on those peaceful fields more than 150 years later made the enormous human cost of that day particularly difficult to comprehend.
At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, history became even more tangible. From July 1–3, 1863, Union General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac defeated Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee’s second invasion of the North. Gettysburg produced the greatest number of casualties of any battle of the Civil War and, together with the Union victory at Vicksburg, became one of the great turning points of the conflict. Seeing the battlefield brought a scale and immediacy to events that no history book quite can.
So Out East — Summer 2016 became a journey through very different pieces of America: Pittsburgh and Cincinnati baseball, a beautiful Ohio college town, cherished time with old friends, and the solemn battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg.
A little baseball, a lot of history, good friends, family, and miles of open road—the ingredients for a pretty great American summer. ⚾🚕☀️🇺🇸