A week ago I returned from my most recent trip to Gettysburg.  This time I went with my writing group on our yearly Altered Fluid writing retreat.  We rented two amazing houses approximately six miles east south-east of the battlefield.

I found myself making multiple trips to the battlefield for my own research, and every day I’d take a group of writers out and give them my own version of a tour of the battlefield.  No one dozed off on me, so I’ll consider that a success.

This is the first time I’ve visited Gettysburg while writing about the battle. It is an amazing but humbling experience to spend an evening reading and researching about men of the 19th Indiana Regiment, and then walk the National Cemetery the next day and see the names of some of those very same men etched in the stones that fan out along the ground.

Overall, I didn’t get as much writing done over our five days as I would have liked, but it was still a great time, both because of the location and the company.