Spontaneous trip to Shiloh

About three weeks ago, I attended one of those management luncheons — you know the type — where one of the speakers addressing the crowd talked about the Battle of Shiloh and more importantly, how the leadership there can be directly correlated to the present and business management principles. I’m not very much into the whole pro networking really, but I found this speech fascinating.

To that end, last Sunday afternoon I ended up at lunch with a friend, who asked “what are you going to do with the rest of your day?”. After a bit of thought, I said “50/50 shot. If the camera is on the Goldwing, I’m going to ride to Shiloh. If not, I’ll go home and go back to sleep.”

2.5 hours later (4pm), I pulled in to the Shiloh National Battleground Park lot, camera loaded and ready to stretch my legs.

Now at 4pm, with another 2.5 hour ride ahead of me, I’m battling the clock for daylight. I’m also — for some incomprehensible reason — battling the park’s trinket shop which doesn’t fathom the need to carry AA batteries for when tourist’s cameras run dry.

As such, I was only able to spend time walking the National Cemetary at Shiloh (which is impressive) and taking about 50 or so pics before the camera died. I didn’t get to tour the battleground itself, but plan to go back with multiple sets of batteries and a full day to walk around.

I did however get to tour the museum on the grounds with all the civil war artifacts. While that’s always neat stuff to see, I walked away thinking only two things:

1) Every piece of clothing I saw leads me to believe that I — at 6′4″ and 320# would have been an absolute giant to these people.

2) Based on the photos on the wall, Kevin Kline did a FANTASTIC job impersonating Grant in that Wild Wild West “reimagining”. Looks EXACTLY like Grant in the movie…

So. Another 2.5 hours later, and I’m at the house, ready, or I should say “ok with” the concept of Monday. Weird thing is, and as a rider, I don’t object, the Garmin GPS took me in 100% completely different directions coming and going, meaning I saw 2x as much on the ride as I would have normally.

All this has to do me, because it’s been raining ever since, and will probably continue to do so until this upcoming Friday (the 8th)