Story Six: Just Another Battlefield

Growing up, our family vacations were never quite the same as other families. You see, as educators, my parents believed in instilling us girls with sense of history, an appreciation for our American past and the land which birthed the history. Namely, Civil War battlefields. My dad is a major Civil War buff, so if there was a battlefield within 45 miles of our vacation destination, we were going. We took three big trips growing up; two driving trips, one to D.C. and another to Tennessee, and one flying trip to Disney World. Don't ask me how we fit Disney World into "The Great Tour of American Civil War Battlefields", we just went, and my dad almost got into a fight, but that's a story for another day. :-)

Civil War battlefields: we went, we saw, we conquered. On the last leg of our Tennessee trip, my dad wanted to stop at one last battlefield. The exact field has sense escaped me, as has the name of the bloody battle previously fought there. All I remember is a battle of a different nature, when two punky pre-teenage girls took up arms, in the form of walk-mans and cassette tapes, against the advent of knowledge and historical appreciation to fight for the right to turn our brains off and ride roller coasters. At this point, my mom, dad, sister and I had spent almost a week together in our fearless Ford station wagon. Food supplies were running low in the back; all the sugar cereal was gone and the only soda left was RC Cola. It was hot, we were tired, and there was one more battlefield left to go. Fortunately, this was a drive-through battlefield. You get a cassette, stick it in the tape deck, and get a self-guided tour.

My sister and I waited patiently as my mom inserted the cassette. After the first bend in the road, our parents were fully ensconced in scenes of the past and Libby and I felt it safe to slip our headphones over our ears. We drove for awhile in the cool bliss of 80's hair-band rock. I was gazing out the window at the full green trees lining the side of the road, soaking in some Bon Jovi, when all of a sudden an angry cry of, "Girls!" pulled my attention back to the moment. My dad, in the process of highlighting some event which took place during the battle, had come to the realization that neither of his prodigies was paying any interest at all to the events which had taken place on this land over 100 years ago.

Ooops doesn't really do it justice. Suffice it to say, the head phones were promptly removed. I don't remember the exact conversation that followed, but I believe it was shortly after that our parents took us to an Alpine slide in the mountains of Tennessee. It was the closest thing to a roller coaster they could find, "The Great Tour of Civil War Battlefields" preempted for a season.

Blessings and Peace,
Sara