Mike's Ride for Clean Air: Gettysburg

Gettysburg

Mr Lincoln said it best:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

August 2, 2012

Todd, Doran and I rode our bicycles off to the Gettysburg battlefield. Here are a few pictures. I wish I was a better photographer, and wish I could write better. The last couple of days, with the Flight 93 Memorial and now Gettysburg is moving to say the least. Our little band has ridden across over 3200 miles of the USA, from the Cascades, the Missoula Valley, through the Little Bighorn, past Mt Rushmore and Laura Wilder's South Dakota, to Germanic New Ulm, bustling Madison, and the cornfields of Illinois and Ohio. Then through downtown Cleveland and old Pennsylvania towns to get to this place. I am honored to have been able to do this.