Daily Didactic The day started in the strangely vacant Parvin State Park campground on the New Jersey Cape. We are heading toward Wisconsin, to see old teacher friends from Anchorage, and so began bobbing and weaving out of New Jersey, through a bit of Delaware, a chunk of Maryland, and into southern Pennsylvania. This is the sort of country with so many backroads that there are no right or wrong routes, just a lot to ponder. Our track took us through Gettysburg, which we had visited four years ago, so we seized the opportunity to do two of our favorite activities in Gettysburg. First, we hit the authentic dimly lit colonial tavern in the basement of the Dobbin House, the oldest house in Gettysburg, for some refreshing pub food. Second, we headed for the Gettysburg Battlefield Visitor Center to check the schedule of Brian's all time favorite civil war instructional tool, the Electric Map.The Electric Map is a classroom sized relief map of the Gettysburg battlefield area with stadium seats around it. The lights in the room dim and the map lights up with hundreds of small bulbs under the direction of a disembodied narrator. The most apt analogy is a gigantic Lite Brite. The narration explains the movement of troups and key places in the Gettysburg battle and the map responds with the illumination of the little bulbs. The Electric Map is 1938 technology and is truly elegant in a "retro tech" kind of way. It was also starting in three minutes. After the show, Theresa eventually coaxed Brian out of the visitor center, we called our friends in Indiana from the parking lot, and got on our way.Initially we had intended to take Highway 30, the Lincoln Highway, from Pennsylvania to Illinois, but after a few hours of climbing up and down the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains through construction we realized it was going to take us a few days longer than we had to get to Wisconsin. Eventually, we bailed on Highway 30 and jumped on the Penna Turn Pike and began to make record time west. We crossed into Ohio and drove late in the evening, finally calling it a "five state day" just outside of Toledo.