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The fishing advice I will leave to others but I will throw my two cents in for the other part.

I think you have a civic obligation to visit Gettysburg. I have visited many of the battle fields of our past wars, I grew up near Valley Forge and the Brandywine campaigns many sites, to Trenton and Washingtons Crossing. I have been to Yorktown and Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord. I have visited Antietem, the Shenandoah valley, the Wilderness, Petersburg and Bull Run. I have seen Normandy, Vimy Ridge (Ok Thats the Canadians), Belleau Wood and several old airbases in England from which the Bombers left for Germany, many never to return. I have even been to Tippecanoe, where a young William Henry Harrison defeated Chief Tecumseh in 1811.

My point, not one of these sites affected me as Gettysburg did. It is an eery place, not in a saturday matinee funny music kind of way, but in the silence that seems to hang there like a fog. The most enduring and awe inspiring site though you may find the part of this field that affected me most viscerally somewhat odd for a Pennsylvania boy.

Stand on Seminary Ridge and look across to the Union Lines on Cemetary ridge, almost a mile distant. On July 3rd 1863 General George Pickett started the Charge that bears his name leading 15,000 men across that open field. For almost a mile under the most intense enemy fire imaginable they never faltered, they breached the center of the Union lines at a point now marked by a truly insignificant memorial, but the moment was brief The union closed ranks and Pickett was ultimately thrown back, retreating back across that same unending mile of open field, only 5000 would make it back to their lines. Eight Generals led their divisions across that mile of open grass, five of them died, but Pickett is the only name remembered.

To really understand what these men did you must take the now pleasant walk from Seminary Ridge over to the memorial on Cemetary ridge, only then does the real enormity of the charge hit you. It makes one wonder what could possibly make a man charge across that field into certain death. The impossibility of the endeavor is obvious and yet the Confederate Army did not falter, did not shrink from the task and almost carried the day.

As a kid I remember my first trip to the battlefield. In the museum was a display of stuff dug up from route of Picketts Charge, an old bayonet, buttons, pistols and broken guns, Cannonballs and grape shot. In the case was also a pair of bullets that had hit head on in mid air and welded themselves together. Think of the odds against that. That two bullets hit so completely in line with each other that they simply melded into a single deformed ball of lead, rather than ricochetting away. A guy was commenting on that to the curator, who agreed that the odds against such a perfect strike were astronomical, but pointed out that tens of thousands of bullets were being fired in both directions each minute of the battle. He then opened a drawer in the exhibit pedestal and brought out a shoebox full to the top with bullets that had hit head on in mid air, there were over 100 of them in that box. The fury of that day boggles the mind, it is incomprehensible to those of us who did not endure it. I do not think that even in the trenches of flanders the volume of opposing fire was ever as heavy as it was at Gettysburg on that hot July afternoon in 1863.

Amazingly enough, Pickett Survived that charge and when years after the event was asked why the charge had failed was qoted as replying "I always thought the Yankees had something to do with that." Pickett, who graduated 59th out of a class of 59 from West point in 1847, a class that would produce 20 General Staff members for both sides of the war, including Stonewall Jackson and George McClellan spent the rest of the war in obscurity. He fought in North Carolina for the remainder of the war, being relieved from duty the day before Lee surrendered at Appomatax Courthouse. He fled to Canada to avoid prosecution but returned to the US when President Grant Pardoned the confederacy. He ended his life as an insurance salesman, it is also reported that to his dying day he blamed Lee issuing the order that decimated his division.

The battle itself was not truly important to the outcome of the war, it would be decades before historians started to see it as the turning point, and our history books make more of its impact than either side felt at the time. Both sides took heavy casualties and needed to nurse their wounds before continuing the fight, although had McClellan pushed forward after the retreating Lee he would have trapped the entire Army of Virginia against the Potomac River and might well have ended the war right there.

So with this overlong and extremely windy introduction, go to gettysburg, walk the battlefield and listen to the eerie silence.