story4967.xml

story4967.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I live in El Paso, TX, but on September 11th I was on vacation with friends in NY. Our plans for that particular day were to drive down to Washington D.C. to go sightseeing and return on that Wednesday, the 12th, to do more sightseeing in NY. After staying up all night in the city that never sleeps, we decided to head back to our hotel room, which was on a military base in NJ. We dropped off a friend in Brooklyn and drove back into Manhattan where we took the Westside Freeway to the tunnel. As we drove past the WTC we actually thought about getting out and doing our sightseeing then, this was a little before 8:30 am. Since parking is so hard to find and we were already late for picking up a friend to make the trip to D.C., we fortunately decided to see the towers the next day. By the time we exited the tunnel back to NJ, the first radio announcemount came over the air about a plane hitting the towers. I honestly thought that it must be a joke, we just drove past there. Unfortunately it was not a joke at all. By the time we reached our hotel room, the second plane had already hit as well as the Pentagon. We were in a complete state of shock and horror. The first things we tried to do were get in touch with our families to let them know that we were alright. That was almost impossible with the way the phone lines were. We did get through to our rental car agency and arrange to pick up another vehicle to get home, since the news had already stated the closing of the airports and we were to fly out of Newark Int'l on that Thursday, the 13th. We had to drive back up to Newark to trade in the car we had for another. On the way up there I remember seeing the huge cloud of smoke over Manhattan, it was terrible. After going through armed guards to get into the airport, we traded our car in and headed home. On the way back down the New Jersey Turnpike you could see just miles and miles of ambulances speeding up the Turnpike from different counties and cities. That really hit home on how horrible the damage was. (We hadn't seen a lot the news coverage of the events, yet.) Although we were all extremely thankful to be a life, it hurt to know that so many others were not as fortunate as us. The tragic victims and heroes of 9/11 will always have a place in my heart.