Okay, so here’s an overview of Kristy’s visit here. I’m not very good at chronological story telling, so I’m just going to go over the highlights. This installment is about our trip to New York City. It was awesome—not because we saw a bunch of stuff, but because we had a good time together.
I decided it would be best to go down to my parents’ house the day before, rather than try to do the whole trip in one day. It’s about 6 ½ hours to NYC from Watertown. My parents live about 2 ½ hours from NYC. So we got some sleep and left there at about 8:00 a.m. the next day. Kristy’s main interests were Ground Zero, the Holocaust Museum, the church that now has the cross made out of the beams of one of the buildings, and Ellis Island (Statue of Liberty).
The first thing I did wrong was make Kristy the navigator instead of having it figured out beforehand. Not that she’s a bad navigator, but I didn’t give her much to work with. I have driven in the city plenty of times and figured I’d be able to get around okay. I was driving, so I handed her the Rand McNally map book and told her to get us there. First of all, I should have MapQuested it, to make sure the book was right, find out about construction, etc. So we spent a lot of time driving in circles.
Our first destination was the World Trade Center site, which is now being prepared for Freedom Tower. Very, very awesome sight to see, once you figure out how to get there. So we drove into NYC, took the wrong highway, and ended up in Queens. Oh well, at least there were some sites to keep us interested, like the alien tower/ship thing from Men in Black. We passed by that twice. (Note: In NYC, if you miss your exit or discover you are headed in the wrong direction, it is absolutely futile and sheer insanity to try to exit the highway onto local roads to try to turn around. Your best option is to keep going until you find another highway that will swing back around to the area you’re supposed to be in. And Lord help you if you need to use a bathroom.)
After finally finding Ground Zero, and after driving back and forth a couple times, we found a parking garage. Just thankful to be able to get out of the car, I stupidly did not look at the prices. I had a bad feeling, though, when I saw that it was valet parking and all the valets were in tuxes. So we got our stuff (including the stroller I had brought for Ayla), I uneasily handed the valet my keys, and we started walking in the general direction of Ground Zero.
Oh, I forgot to mention, it was pouring the whole time. Kristy, however, is a true Washingtonian, and Ayla is a little kid who loves to play in the rain, so I was the only one bundled up. Everyone had an umbrella but us.
We had to use the bathroom, so the first thing we did was dive into a Subway (sandwich shop), which surely would have a public restroom. Ha ha, this is NYC, and no one has public restrooms, lest you deal drugs in their stalls. So we decided to keep going to Ground Zero. We ended up standing in a pillared entryway to some huge building, looking incredibly lost and wet. There was a lady standing near the curb who looked to be some kind of NYC native. She was dressed pretty respectably, had her hair done pretty neatly, and was the first friendly soul we’d encountered. She also had an orange arm band on, which said something I couldn’t see clearly. She said, “Are you visitors?” I thought, “Hmm, she must be a volunteer guide or something.” We soggily said yes, and Kristy asked, “Where is Ground Zero?” She smiled and said we could follow her, and to just wait under the overhang until the free bus came. The free bus wasn’t as bad as it sounds. In fact, we were the goofiest looking bunch riding, me with my drippy stroller and all.
The lady said she would signal us when it was time for us to get off. In the meantime, I was trying to keep track of the streets we were turning down, when I heard her say to the bus driver, “I got arrested this morning at the protest.” Oh great. “Bill had a problem with his zipper, but this guy is killing our kids,” etc. Oh Lord.
Finally she signaled us, and she got off with us. She gave us directions to a spot where we could look into the WTC site from above. Before she let us go on our way, she showed us her arm band, which said, “No torture”, and her shirt, which said something like, “I will not be silenced”. She told us that President Bush was signing the torture bill that day, and that she had been protesting it. It took Kristy an effort to keep her mouth shut, since this lady had just helped us. Kristy, remember, is a military wife, whose husband is fighting in Iraq, and neither she nor I appreciate down-talking our President. No, he isn’t perfect and he did mess up, but he is our President.
We thanked her and went on our way. As we walked into the building she had indicated and the doors closed behind me, the first thing I saw spanning the stairway in front of me were the words “One Wall Street”. I looked around and realized we were IN Wall Street, the economic capital of the world. And I’m standing there in my soaking wet coat with my messed up hair, my dirty sneakers, and a wet stroller full of stuff. Everyone around us was in suits and business attire. I felt like such a goober!
We looked at the directory for a bathroom. It was all the way on the other side of the complex. Great. So we decided once again to keep going. We found exactly what she had told us about, and it really was something to see. We continued on and found an actual viewing area outside where some memorials were set up. It was quite moving for me because, 1) Travis and I had actually gone up into one of the towers one time and taken pictures of the top of the other tower, and 2) my Mom and I had visited it less than a year after the attack. To see the progress that had been made, and to think that some people had tried to destroy our spirit in such a horrible way was very moving. It made me very appreciative of our nation, and especially of God who gave us this nation.
We took our time looking at the memorials and the site itself. Incidentally, I think it was about the time that we were there that they found some remains from the attack in an adjacent manhole.
Across the street from the WTC site is Fire Station 10, which lost many, many firefighters. Along the outside wall of the fire station is a bronze memorial to those they lost.
The rain had subsided a little, and we went out of the viewing area to a Burger King that was close to the fire station. They, mercifully, had a bathroom. But it was one toilet with one sink, no mirror, and barely enough room to turn around. Again, they didn’t want shenanigans going on in their bathrooms, which is understandable. So we ate there, and Ayla got to play with another little girl whose parents were visiting for a wedding which had taken place in Central Park. Wow.
About the time we finished eating, I got real uneasy about my car. We decided to go back and get it. So we headed back in the general direction of the parking garage, but we had taken that free bus and had no idea where it was in relation to our current position. One smart thing I had done before we crossed into NY was buy a waterproof map of NYC. It came in very handy while we were wandering around, looking for something that seemed familiar. We finally saw a police officer, and Kristy asked him which way Wall Street was. He pointed vaguely ahead of him. I noticed that his face was scarred up, and I wondered what he’d been through in his career as a NYC cop.
One thing we had not realized was that the particular parking garage we had picked was a chain and had something like 114 garages in NYC. The ticket they’d handed me had no address or business name on it. We just remembered their sign and walked around looking for that. Finally, on the third try, we found the garage that had our car. Turns out it was $12 and change per HALF HOUR, and it came up to $33 to get my car out.
We briefly thought about looking for the church with the cross. It is supposedly “close” to the site, but that could mean anywhere, so we abandoned that idea.
We drove around for a while looking for the ferry to Ellis Island, but got lost again. It was about 4:00 pm by this time, and we both agreed it would be best to cut our losses and head home.
On the way home we took the wrong highway again and ended up heading toward New Haven, Connecticut. I had been lost there before, though, so I wasn’t too concerned about finding our way home. We eventually ended up heading in the right direction, only to miss our exit that would take us up into NY State again. (To get to my parents house from NYC, you have to go through NJ, and then back into NY.) So I called Mom out of desperation and she guided us to a route I was very familiar with—the road home from Grandma’s.
One thing that totally impressed me about the whole trip was that neither of us got upset, impatient, or argumentative. It was nice. We just laughed a lot and said we’d have lots to blog about.
In the meantime, we got to talk about all kinds of stuff, drink a lot of coffee, and to learn more about each other. Family can be pretty cool.
So that was our NYC trip.
