Chancellorsville Battlefield Jr Ranger

Chancellorsville Battlefield

Back in September we visited the Fredericksburg Battlefield portion of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. The Jr Ranger program for this NMP has four parts, and you can complete as many or few as you have time for. Being the over achiever that I am, we visited all the battlefields and completed all four parts.

Fredericksburg
Spotsylvania
Wilderness
Chancellorsville

Because of the time it took for each of the accompanying driving tours, it took us four trips over two months to complete everything. On our first visit we picked up all the Jr Ranger packets we would need and filled out what we could before going back. This helped cut down on sitting and waiting while Sunshine fills in the packets. The little boys just don't do well sitting and waiting for very long.

Because we were visiting battlefields I didn't get a lot of good photo ops at each location. The first group are from Spotsylvania.

the boys were so happy to be out of their car seats

that tongue!

cute boys!

I love this picture!

As we did the driving tour for Chancellorsville, one thing I did was to take pictures of all the markers. We needed information from them for the packets, but the boys were getting restless. Getting them in and out and in and out of the car was just not an option at that point. Rather than standing around, trying to locate the information being asked for, we took pictures of all the signs and then sifted through them for the needed information after we returned home. It meant we didn't actually see as much of the sites as I'd have liked, but it was a cold, windy day and the boys were cranky, so it was the best we could do. And in the end it actually worked out really well.

Sunshine received the Fredericksburg rocker when we went to that battlefield, but the other three rockers could only be received at Chancellorsville (there's no visitor's centers at Spotsylvania and Wilderness- just shelters with displays). Once those three packets were completed, we took them to the visitor's center and we could finally call this one finished.

We learned a lot about the Civil War battles that took place in these areas. The shear numbers involved are hard to imagine. I didn't take a picture, but I should have, of a room in the visitor's center that has names written on it from floor to ceiling on all four sides of people who died in these battles. There was a section running across the middle of each wall with pictures of people affected by the fighting- some who died, some who lived in the area and had to deal with the aftermath.

I gotta say- it bugs me that the rockers don't take up all the space around the patch. Were they designed to go on top of the outer black ring? They'd cover the name of the park then, so I can't imagine that was the case.