Well, let's wrap this up, shall we? It's time for me to get back to Greenville so I can go back to work and make a living. I left you last week in Gettysburg and now I have to get back on the road and head south for about 500 miles. Yes, I am 500 miles away from home. Hey, that sounds like a good title for a song. I wonder if it's already taken.

Anyway, I left Gettysburg on that unseasonably chilly April morning, heading south on US 15 as it crosses the field over which General George Pickett's men charged almost 150 years ago. I crossed into Maryland and made my way to Frederick, a city I lived in for a while way back in the 80's.

My first top was the Roger B. Taney house, a brick structure located in the older part of town. Taney's place in history rests on writing the majority opinion in the famous Dred Scott case, asserting that Negro slaves were not citizens and were not entitled to the same rights as white men.

In the house in which I grew up there was a door frame that had accumulated a lot of pencil marks over the years. It was where our dad would measure our height from time to time so that we could see how much we had grown since the last time we had been measured. It was always a thrill for me to see that I had gotten taller, even if it was only by a sixteenth of an inch or so.

A road trip that I took this past Thursday made me hearken back to those days because, for just a few minutes, I stood taller than anyone else east of the Rocky Mountains. More on that in a minute.

I recently joined James Spurck, the managing editor of The Times Examiner, and his family for a day trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Our main destination for the day was Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak in the eastern United States.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the surrounding region has plenty for the tourist to see and do. In addition to the three attractions I told you about last week, the Guinness World Records Museum, Ripley's Believe It or Not Odditorium and Ripley's Aquarium, there is Cades Cove, which I wrote about two weeks ago.

There is also a plethora of other attractions designed to grab the tourist dollar, including the Dollywood Amusement Park in nearby Pigeon Forge. And, of course, Gatlinburg is nestled at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has a wealth of activities in store for the outdoor enthusiast.

However, on the second full day of my trip last August to Gatlinburg, I was able to break free from the allure of the town and took a side trip several miles north to see some other sites.

For the past two weeks I have related to you my experiences while touring Cades Cove during a visit I paid last August to the Gatlinburg area. After exiting the 11-mile Cades Cove loop road, disappointed in my lack of an ursine encounter, I returned to Gatlinburg.

I found a reasonably-priced parking space on the top level of a parking deck behind the Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies and rode the elevator down to street level. As I walked by some parked city buses that were collecting tourists for the next run through town, I considered buying a bus pass and riding one of them to the various attractions I planned to visit. I decided instead to walk since my destinations were not too far away and because I could use the exercise.

Lee and Jackson. These two names struck terror into the hearts of many a Union soldier and gave confidence and hope to thousands of Confederates during the War Between the States. Together they, along with their fellow gray-clad generals and the armies that they led, were quite the match for the larger armies of the North.

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee had much in common. They were both native-born Virginians, although Jackson was born in a part of Virginia that would later become West Virginia. Both of them graduated from West Point Military Academy. Both were also educators of military cadets. They also shared a fervent faith in and reliance upon Jesus Christ as their Savior.

In the first installment of this new travel series I told you about the first leg of my trip to Chattanooga. We got as far as the Nantahala Outdoor Center on US 74, which is several miles south of Bryson City.

I continued south along 74 towards my next destination, the town of Murphy. A few miles past the Outdoor Center the two-lane highway ceased to hug the Nantahala River and began to straighten out into gently rolling country.

As I left the Petersburg National Battlefield, about which I wrote last week, I turned right onto Crater Road. I did not have far to go before I found another site of historic interest – Blandford Church.

I pulled right onto the grounds of the extensive cemetery, drove around a bit, then parked near the church in order to get a photo. Unfortunately the photo turned out rather dark. (I am definitely getting a digital camera before my next trip.) It was evening time and the building was closed for tours for the day, but I later looked up the church on the internet and found some information.

For four years in the 1980’s I lived within a few miles of the Petersburg National Battlefield Park in Petersburg, Virginia. Being a Civil War enthusiast, I naturally visited it many times during that period. Or so one would think.

Actually, I visited the battlefield only once during all that time, and even on that one occasion I visited only the visitor center.

I decided to remedy that deficiency in my Civil War touring this past February when I took a trip to Baltimore to help my mother celebrate her 90th birthday.

“Oh, the humanity!” exclaimed news correspondent Herbert Morrison as he watched the conflagration that consumed the airship Hindenburg on May 6, 1937, at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Morrison was recording a radio broadcast of the landing of the Hindenburg for WLS, a radio station in Chicago. Other news organizations were filming the landing for newsreels. While those who were in attendance anticipated viewing a very rare event, the landing of an airship, no one could have in the least expected that they would be witness to one of the most shocking and dramatic news stories of the 20th century.

Yes, it is true. I know it is hard to believe, especially since just a few short weeks ago I wrapped up a series of travel articles telling you about my adventures on a trip to Missouri and Tennessee. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “There I go again.”

Yes, I am “on the road again,” to quote still another well-known individual. And yes, my gas tank is full and my coffee mug is brimming, and I am raring to hit the road. So let’s go, shall we?

It was back in late September that I started out on my yearly week’s vacation. My destination was Maryland to visit with family, but, as many of you already know, I don’t always take the shortest route to my eventual destination. This time around I decided to amble up the Blue Ridge Parkway and take it as far north as I could before nightfall.