Where Dreams Are Made Of

The morning started early because I wanted to get into town as early as possible without it being ridiculous. We headed over to the train station and bought all our tickets. It turns out that the commute is going to be quite expensive. Our final stop was Penn Station, where I bought my keychains before we stepped out onto the busy streets of New York City. The first thing we did was head straight for Times Square to get

oriented. There were so many people trying to hand us pamphlets and it was a tad overwhelming but eventually we made it and managed to find someone with a pamphlet for the bus tours our Explorer Passes covered. We had some fun looking around in Times Square before heading off to a bus stop to see if we could get on a bus. Well, Dad had time to order a piece of pizza, eat it and then digest it before we were able to get on a bus. In order to hear the tour guide we had to plug in earphones because the bus didn’t have speakers, but the tour guide moved his hands

around a lot so it was hard to hear him at times. On the tour, we went through No-Ho, So-Ho, Chinatown, past the Empire State building, the Flatiron building and the New York City Library. We decided to stop at the World Trade Centre, which they have now begun to build up. Before we headed all the way over to Ground 0, which is not a name New Yorkers use anymore by the way, we stopped at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The church was used as a refuge for all those in the area on September 11th, 2001, since it was very close to the site of the destruction, but not close enough so as to be harmed. We looked around for a bit before walking the rest of the way over to the Trade Centre ground. The largest building in the area is the One World Trade Centre, which is designed so that it starts as a square, twists into an octagon and then fades back into a square again, representing the eight corners of the Twin

Towers. There are two seemingly bottomless pools in the middle of a square park, representing the foundation of the old towers, with all the names of those lost on 9/11 engraved all the way around. An NYPD officer had recently been shot and there were flowers lining the side of the south pool dedicated to police officers, firefighters and EMTs. We decided to see if we could get a tour over at the museum with our Explorer Passes. There was about a half hour until the next tour went out, so we decided to go over to the deli next door for some lunch. We each had a sandwich and they were pretty good, but the service was ridiculously disorganized. We finished with just enough time to check out the museum. It was mostly a whole bunch of personal experience stories, which was quite neat, but we didn’t have much time before the tour group had to line up outside and receive our little earphone packs. Our guide was a retired man, who had been a utility worker and a retired

firefighter on 9/11. He saw the first plane hit from his office and raced over to the nearest fire station to see what he could do. The NYPD had done the first total recall in the history of the police department and our tour guide was taking the names of officers as they came in to report for duty. When the second plane hit, he felt like he needed to be out on the job doing something so we went to grab his utility bag and his volunteer firefighter’s outfit to run out and help. He told us that he watched both towers fall. After the wreckage had settled, he went out to try and find survivors, finding almost none. Apparently, firefighters have a little device on their suits that sets off an alarm if the firefighter wearing it stops moving for too long of a period of time. Walking through the wreckage, after the dust had settled somewhat, the only sound you could hear was the sound of the alarms ringing from underneath 60 feet of

granite. The buildings were designed so as to have the maximum amount of floor space as possible, with 60% of the building being supported by the outside walls and the other 40% being supported by and inside column holding all 99 elevators and 3 staircases. When they collapsed, they basically pancaked all the way down, ejecting people and body parts up to five blocks away. The fires underneath the rubble burned for six months straight, so hot that firefighter’s boot would melt off when they walked over it. There was so much dust and grime in the air, as well as a toxic gas and it has put all those working on the scene at risk for lung cancer. A few thousand have dies and a few thousand more are still on a watch list. One friend of our tour guide had died last year

from the lingering affects of the toxins. There was another guest speaker that came in, talking about the four Zurich employees that had lost their lives. The Zurich building was further down the street, but those four unlucky ones had gone in that morning to pick up some papers and such things. The tour guide told us that all though the attack happened in the States, the World Trade Centres were targeted, buildings that held thousands of people from different nationalities, indicating the attack wasn’t just focused on one country. It was aimed against the world. After our tour, we headed over to Battery Park and did a

walk along the harbour, checking out yachts and shops and the view of the Statue of Liberty. Then we headed up Broadway to check out Wall Street and try and find the Bull. We didn’t end up finding the statue, but we saw it when we got back on the tour bus to take it back up to Penn Station. The traffic ended up so bad that we missed two of the three possible commuter trains we could take and then had to get off and walk/run 2km back to the station. We just made the train and got back to our campsite around 10:00pm. It was a long day, but a good one. Peace out m8s.

#camping #newyorkcity #newyork