Campsites at Lake Anna are very nice, and multiple trails take you out onto the many peninsulas that jut into the lake. My section of the camp was quiet until Friday night, when it filled up rapidly, but it emptied out just as rapidly as people headed back to work.

Russ caught up with me Thursday, arriving in a pouring rain. The hot showers came in mighty handy! He stayed for a recuperation day on Friday, then headed to Palmyra and an overnight at a church.

Saturday I visited Spotsylvania Court House, on the mistaken assumption that that was where the surrender of the Confederacy was signed. (I was wrong: it was Appomattox.) Spotsylvania was, however, the site of one of the major battles of the Civil War, so I toured the extensive battlefields.

There are MILES of these old earthworks—there were 18 days of brutal trench warfare here. More than anything else, they gave me the sense of how massive this battle was. After a while, reading about and viewing the site of so much death and destruction started to get depressing, so to cheer myself up, I stopped in to the nearby Confederate Cemetery.

While most of the graves were simple stones, like the first picture, a few (mostly officers) had more elaborate markers like the second picture. Of course, there was a monument (third pic) to the gallant fallen, with wording that rang dischordantly to my northern ears:

“We have gathered the sacred dust, of warriors tried and true, who bore the flag of our nation’s trust, and fell in the cause ’tho lost, still just, and died for me and you.”

Note the nation referred to here is NOT the United States of America!

Saturday night I introduced a very nice family of three to the board game Bonanza, and we had so much fun that they took a photo of the game board and a copy of the rules. I guess I could have brought extra copies of the game with me, but I suspect I’d run out pretty quickly. Nothing like a great game to make new friends!

I’ll leave Sunday to (hopefully) get a camp at Stony Fork Campground, near the southern end of the Jefferson National Forest in southwestern VA.