We’re exhausted. And pretty happy.

Gettysburg was a great trip. My birthday was fantastic. The football was good on Saturday afternoon and got better Saturday night. And the baseball? As I found out when I woke up Sunday morning, it went OK as well.

I told you about the ghost tour in Gettysburg Tuesday night. There are a couple of details related to the ghosty stuff I didn’t realize until later. First, when we looked at the pictures I took during the tour, we noticed several orbs — supposedly indications of some kind of supernatural activity — in pictures I took of the town’s first school house. The story with that place? A Union soldier got caught behind Confederate lines sometime during the first day of the battle, and spent the next couple of days hiding out in silence on the roof of the place, which was being used as a makeshift hospital. One of the orbs showed up right at the apex of the building’s roof. Pretty cool.

In the middle of the following night, The Wife freaked herself out a little bit while listening to what turned out to be the clicking of a carbon monoxide detector in our cabin, and woke me up so she could pee and put some bathroom stuff — which she thought was the source of the noises — in our truck. About 30 minutes after we turned off the lights — and were both just starting to doze off again — my cell phone suddenly lit up the entire room. The phone was off, so no calls or messages were coming through. There was an alarm set to get us up in the morning, but that wouldn’t go off for another several hours. And if another alarm had gone off, it would have set off the alarm tone as well, as the sound was enabled — but we just got the lit-up screen, all by itself. As far as I know, the only way that screen could have turned on at that point was if someone was handling the phone or pushing buttons. Pretty freaky.

Touring the battlefields was breathtaking. Anyone who sort of paid attention in high-school history class has basic idea of how the battle progressed, but seeing it firsthand — seeing the terrain and understanding how it influenced troop movements and attacks — really gives you a clear picture of how and why things happened. And simply being there, at a place where the country’s history turned on a dime … it’s the kind of thing that gives you chills, even just by reading the inscriptions on the unit monuments scattered all over town.

I told you about the meal the first night; we continued to eat well for the rest of the trip. We had a monster breakfast at Ernie’s Texas Lunch on Wednesday morning, and returned there for their famous hot dogs on Thursday. And the visit to Appalachian was excellent — the beer ranged from good to amazing (the barleywine) and I had a crabmeat pizza, with a garlic-butter sauce — to go alongside. Hoo boy.

We drove out to Columbus on Friday morning, had an amazing dinner at Trattoria Roma in Grandview, and caught the hysterical David Sedaris show at the Palace Theater Friday night. That made for a good birthday, boys and girls.

OK. I understand there have been some interesting sports things that might have happened in the intervening few days. I might even have some thoughts about those things, thoughts that I’ll write about tomorrow. They’re … cough2002cough … interesting. And I’ll write about them. Tomorrow.