I stopped in Gettysburg on my way home from North Carolina last week, and came away with my head full of iconoclasms.

I hadn't been there since we took a field trip to the area in grade school.

We had a nice room at the Hotel Gettysburg for a night, and it is a nice town - despite all the overwhelmingly negative vibes surrounding it.

First, there are the battlefields, of course.

You can spend as much money and time as you want driving or being driven around open fields where battles were fought 146 years ago, although there are few signs of them now. I can't help wondering why a simple momument commemorating the terrible carnage there would not suffice, near the national cemetery where Lincoln gave his famous speech.

It seems morbid to continue to pay homage at such a place of horror.

A three-day battle in which 51,000 Americans were killed by other Americans was a victory for no one.

And, of course, the battlefields, which you could actually see, were apparently not lucrative enough.

They had to create tales about the ghosts of the dead soldiers, that you can still bump into on a dark night and even photograph. I know, some friends showed me pictures they had taken.

Gettysburg is a city of ghosts, and every house, attic, tree, back alley, dip in the road and parking meter in Gettysburg are haunted, and they have the ghost tours and the shelves of ghost books for sale to prove it.

It's malarkey. I'm sure those readers with a fondness for military machismo and and a tabloid-strength respect for ghosts - two icons in America - are warming up their monitors right now to berate me.

But it's still all malarkey.

Thanks for the papers

"Charlie and I visited Colorado to attend the high school graduation of our granddaughter Alyssa Clarke," writes Elena Clarke of Attleboro. "She will be attending Quinnipiac University in the Fall. We visited Denver and the surrounding area and brought back a copy of the Denver Post. It rained quite a bit of the time, but we didn't mind it because they depend on springtime rain to help relieve possible summer drought." "I just spent four days helping to chaperone 22 fabulous students from North Attleboro Middle School out to Iowa State University for the world finals for Odyssey of the Mind," writes Shelly Ross of North Attleboro. "I brought back these papers for you, including an Odyssey 'daily newspaper' that featured a picture of one of our own teams! How exciting!"

Thanks to Ed Drozda for copies of Le Parisien from Paris, the Scottish edition of The Independent and the Financial Times.

"Attached are papers from our recent trip through the Red Rock Country around Sedona, Ariz.," write Barbara and Leo Negus of Mansfield. "Linda Fasteson's article in The Sun Chronicle, 'Explore,' in June 2005 was a great reference for planning and traveling on our trip.

"The Red Rock formations ... were awesome - and colors varied so much with different lightings - sunrise, sunset, storm clouds, clear sunshine, etc. ...

"We enjoyed a Pink Jeep Broken Arrow Tour - enjoyed despite or because of the bumps and twists and turns over hard rock country. Oak Creek Canyon, 16 miles of twisting, turning hair pins - complete with a heavy sleet storm on Memorial Day - was fantastic ...

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE