Eagle-Time Gift-Sharing Thread

Warning: There are approx. 30 large images underneath these spoilers, so if you're reading this a phone or a stone age computer, just.... brace yourself, I guess?

So anyway with that out of the way, I guess it's time to just go ahead and kick off


Eaglequest 2012
(Name pending.)


Chapter 1: Gettysburg

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SpoilerAfter seven straight hours of driving through no man's land, we arrived at our first stop, Gettysburg Pennsylvania.



"Bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemispere? Yawn, whatever." - Me, without even a hint of sarcasm.

But seriously, there's not a whole lot to see here besides some statues, some graves, and some empty fields that used to have people dying on them. The guides tell you a whole bunch of stuff about how many people died where, and what the different tactics were and all that, but after awhile it just kinda blurs together into a giant clusterfuck of statistics and death. My dad seemed to enjoy visiting it though, so good for him. Anyway, here's some pictures I took.



North Carolinian soldiers, marching in the traditional confederate formation???



The Virginia statue is one of my favorites, because you can see it from one of the hills about a mile back, but the metal parts are almost completely invisible against the tree line. So from a distance it looks just like a giant golden pair of pants floating over the battlefield.



And here's Pennsylvania, clearly overcompensating for something.



This picture still makes me mad. I almost had the perfect picture of these two kids carelessly playing on the edge of the VALLEY OF DEATH, but some jerks stepped right in front of me at the last second and ruined it. Oh well, maybe next lifetime.



The Eagle takes a moment of silence to pay its respects to those that lost their lives nearly 150 years ago. Despite not actually having the ability to speak.



After walking around aimlessly through the cemetery for awhile, we stopped at a gift shop that sold some Confederate flags, Confederate T-shirts, Confederate bumper stickers, and plenty of other unpleasant things. I bought that eagle statue at the bottom instead.



And then we saw a spooky ghost and hightailed it right the fuck out of there.

Chapter 2: Washington D.C.

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Spoiler
The rest of the trip to DC went smoothly enough, at least up until we actually made it into the city and had to wait around Bethesda for two hours and get new tires after running over some nails in the street.

And then we just drove straight to the hotel and waited till tomorrow to start the sightseeing.



Ah yes, Washington D.C. "The City of Angels." "The Gateway City." "The Big Easy." "The Manatee State." "The Babylon of the West." "The Twin Cities" (along with Lincoln, Nebraska.)

But of course, DC is best known as "The Putrid Swamp Town" (where the rest of the country gets rid of all of their unwanted traffic, murderers, and politicians.) It's got some nice buildings and monuments though, so we'll let it slide.



And here's me standing in front of the Capitol Building, blinded by the light of patriotism, wearing a pink shirt, and looking almost unfathomably nerdy.

After going through security, we had to watch a 10 minute movie about how great freedom and the constitution are before getting into the rest of the building. The Swedish students in front of us kept snickering the whole time and it hurt my feelings. :(



In case you ever wondered what the inside of our nation's capitol dome looks like: It's a painting of George Washington rising up to become a god, surrounded on all sides by Victory, Liberty, and the female anthropomorphizations of the original 13 colonies.



And then there's this lady directly below Washington who represents WAR AND FREEDOM. I swear to god I'm not making of this up. At least now everyone can all sleep soundly tonight with the knowledge that America is exactly as dumb and tacky as you always imagined.

(Couldn't find any reliable sources on whether she's related to Captain America in any way though.)



I fucked up this picture something fierce, but I know for a fact there's at least four different eagles in this one shot, plus several others scattered around the room.

There are 100 different statues of various famous people, two from each state. This room contains one of the two statues from Ohio, which they recently voted to send home and replace with Thomas Edison, as opposed to Neil Armstrong, the Wright brothers, any of Ohio's other 7 presidents, Drew from TFD, and the guy that wrote the Bone series. Presumably in order to drive home just how dumb Ohio is.

Anyway, then we left and went to check out some of the Smithsonian Museums.



And here's the watch taking in the view of the Washington Monument, as well as a ridiculous number of American flags and one particularly imposing restroom.



Hey look, it's that building from Fallout 3.



Here's the view from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the reflecting pool under construction for some reason. In the background, you can see the Capitol Building and.... maybe some of the Smithsonian Museums? Kinda hard to tell.

Anyway, the Smithsonian Museums were definitely the most interesting part of the National Mall for me at least, and I wish we'd had more time to spend there instead of just running through all the interesting sounding ones in only a few hours. Make sure to set aside a good day or two just for the musuems if any of you guys ever go to DC, there's a lot to see.



And here's the memorial itself. Along with me being completely unaware of Lincoln's terrifying, ominous silhouette in the background.



Then we stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. One of the 58,000 names on it is Roy Phipps, my grandmother's cousin. My dad says he still remembers him from when he was a kid. He also happened to die at just the right time to get himself placed on the top row of this particular block. RIP Roy.



Here's that Fallout 3 building again. But apparently here they call it the Jefferson Memorial instead? Weird.



The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is a relatively new monument, which only went up in late 2011. People walk through those two granite slabs on the left to get into the memorial area, and the statue is cut out of that original chunk of granite and looking out over the Potomac River.

The sudden cooling effect from walking towards the river and the permanent alleviation of all white guilt after visiting were also really cool features as well. A+ monument. Highly recommended.



It was already dark by the time we reached the White House, and I didn't get any good pictures, so I just attached a relevant stock photo instead.

But trust me, the watch did end up travelling within one block of the President of the United States! Probably. And on the day before his birthday too! Crazy stuff.



Anyway, the next day we visited Arlington National Cemetary, which we got to by crossing over this cool, horse-themed bridge.



It's kind of hard to get a sense of how big this place is from photos alone, so I'll just tell you. It's over 400,000 graves spread out across about 1 square mile. This was the most I could fit into a single shot, but it's still probably not even 1% of the total graves here.



I don't know who this woman is.



This here's the Amphitheater that they have funerals in whenever somebody important enough dies. Behind that is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the spot where the Changing of the Guard takes place a couple dozen times per day.



This land all used to belong to General Lee, back before he left to lead the Confederate army. After he died, the US Government took it and turned it into the cemetery it is today.

This is the view from Lee's front yard, literally right across the river from the enemy capital. If you look closely, you can see the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and the Capitol Building from here, as well as some sort of hi-tech metal air-machine. Also notice how D.C. has approx. zero buildings taller than 15 stories high.

The John F. Kennedy Memorial/Burial Site is also located right at the bottom of this hill, but all this dumb ground got in the way so you don't get to see it.



I was gonna take a photo of the Pentagon as we passed it too, but it turns out, it looks the same as just about every other building from any direction other than straight down. So I just took a picture of this cool-looking..... (quickly leafs through physical copy of Wikipedia)...... United States Air Force Memorial.... thing....

After that we spent a good hour or two trying to navigate our way out of the unending nightmare that is DC's infrastructure.



But eventually we escaped and headed north on I-95. On the way we spent a good several seconds taking in Baltimore's skyline before driving right along and never thinking about it again. Pictured above: My cyclopean nose getting ready to smash the Ravens' stadium into a fine mist.

Later I found out that from Avi that he was going to a bunny meetup of some kind in DC, which I ended up missing by less than a day. Which kinda sucks. Sorry Avi, I'll try to get in touch with you sooner next time if I'm ever in the area again. Hope you guys had a good time without me.

We stopped for the night at an Econolodge in Delaware, conveniently located right in between a Denny's and a liquor store.

We had finally managed to escape the Washington's labyrinth, but would we be able to survive the many trials of the New Jersey Turnpike?!?!? Find out in the next exciting episode of Eagle Time! (Spoiler: yes.)

Next time: New York City and Columbus

Word stuff:

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SpoilerWell this ended up taking about two months longer then I had originally planned, and while I could come up with a few work related/getting hammered excuses, for the most part it was just crippling laziness that made me take so long. Sorry everybody, especially BTP. My bad.

Anyway, Bob wanted me to post some of the pictures before sending it off to see if anyone else over here wanted to get a hold of it before it gets sent overseas. So yeah, People in North America: It is still not too late to sign up! Also, people everywhere else in the world, it is still not too EARLY to sign up! Feel free to sign up at your earliest or most convenient convenience.

I'll probably be sending it out at the end of the week to whoever it gets sent to though, so sooner would be better than later if you live in this half of the world.

Eaglequest chapters 3 and 4: Coming to your local internet box in the future at some point, eventually.