Wednesday, September 27, 2006
To Pack: Comfy Shoes
Ryan and I got to New York on Thur. Our hotel was in a ghetto of Jersey. Just a 15 minute walk, and a 1/2 hour bus ride into Manhattan. We must have taken that bus ride 15 times, sometimes getting picked up by the random short bus where we were the only English speakers. Anyway, that night we drank in Times Square, Rockefeller (the ice skating rink is a bar in the summer) and Greenwich. We saw the greatest funk band at a place called Groove. I'm telling you, I wish we had music like that. The next day we slept off our hangovers, then walked them off in Central Park and through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That night, after swinging back to Jersey for the rest of our group, we hit Greenwich again.
The whole weekend 4 of the 9 of us get very adept at ditching the other 5. The other 5 included an egotistical bossy mean man, his wife who went to New York to try to get herself a paying job taking pictures of the race (huh?), a nice boy who's main fault was that he wants the favor of the boss man badly enough to be a little puppy, a firefighter who's cute and knows it, and his 19 year-old girlfriends who literally brought 2, 77 lb bags and only stilleto shoes to wear. Um, yeah. So Ryan and I hung out with Keith (Ryan's captain) and Micah (their engine driver).
Back to the recap. We got ourselves nicely sloshed and played a game of sending the mean boss man and his group to bars that we weren't actually at all night. He! We also managed to accidentally take a train to Queens.
The next morning we knew we had to go to Ground Zero and I wasn't looking forward to it. I'm a little hyper-emotional. When we got down there the first thing we did was go to St. Paul's Chapel. It is right across the street from the WTC and somehow survived the disaster. Rescue workers came here to sleep and pray. The fence outside the church graveyard was the fence you saw in pictures where people posted pictures of their missing loved ones, and where firefighter and policemen's boots were placed on the spikes to be identified.
Just past the fence there you can see a big awning. That's where a memorial should be, but its not. That's a subway station. People are kind of wandering around there aimlessly. There's a few large pictures up on the fence, and that's it. That and the hole. I went to Ground Zero expecting it to be one of the hardest thing I ever did, but I felt nothing. I thought I'd feel all those people who died there, but I didn't. I wish they'd build a memorial. A place for people to go.
The rest of the day was spent registering for the race and visiting a few bars. We then went to the pre-race spaghetti dinner. And guess what? The entertainment was The Temptations. THE Temptations. It was so flipping cool. Then they ushered us outside and they had a huge fireworks show over the Hudson River. It was amazing.
The next morning was the race, and that'll take a whole blog post. Here's a few other random pictures until then.
The rest of the day was spent registering for the race and visiting a few bars. We then went to the pre-race spaghetti dinner. And guess what? The entertainment was The Temptations. THE Temptations. It was so flipping cool. Then they ushered us outside and they had a huge fireworks show over the Hudson River. It was amazing.
The next morning was the race, and that'll take a whole blog post. Here's a few other random pictures until then.
posted by atpanda at 5:47 PM
about me
About Me
- Name: atpanda
- Location: Mesa, Arizona, United States
I'm Amanda. I'm an engineer in an industry full of men, a professional wedding and family portrait photographer, a firefighter's wife, a traveler, and a dogMa.
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1 Comments:
So fun! I would love to see that church one day.
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