Long Weekend in NYC - Part 2

By Sunday (Day 3), I was feeling very pregnant, and missing Avery a lot! However, we planned to go see the 9/11 memorial and museum, so I was interested in that. We bought tickets ahead of time for the museum with a specified entrance time of 1:30. For lunch that day, we went to the Shake Shack in Madison Park, which was only a short walk from our hotel. We had burgers, fries, and delicious milkshakes. We had seen the line for this place on Friday, and it was really, really long, but it was only a 10 minute wait or so on Sunday. We also saw that they were setting up for a gay pride parade...more about that later.  After lunch we headed to the World Trade Center.

NYC Freedom Tower - World Trade Center

We took the subway down to the southern end of Manhattan and headed toward the memorial.  The area that is considered "ground zero" is now 2 giant fountains with trees planted all around, almost like a park. I wasn't sure what to expect, because I knew there was some controversy in the years after 9/11 about what to do there, but I think what they did is perfect. The areas where Towers 1 & 2 stood will never be rebuilt, and they built the new Freedom Tower right next to them. They also built a separate building for the 9/11 Museum, and that was our next stop.

Fountain at Ground Zero

When we arrived at the museum, I understood why it was recommended to purchase tickets ahead of time, and also why they gave you a designated time. They try to regulate the amount of people in the museum at one time so that it's not too crowded. We still had to wait outside in a line, but I think this is a good system to be able to take your time in the museum without tons of people around. They said it would take about 2 hours to go through, and we took just under 3 hours! There was just so much to see, and the museum is really well done. Of course it's very sad to think about everything that happened that day, but it's also a reminder of how our country comes together in a situation like that. Travis and I bought some headphones and started with the audio tour that we could download on our phones. There was a lot of information on the how WTC buildings 1&2 were built, and how the planes' impacted them. We watched several short videos about the rebuilding of ground zero, and also listened to some audio phone messages from either people on planes, people in the buildings, etc. It's really amazing how composed some of the messages sounded, knowing they were in danger. 

Some of the things that I found interesting were a complete timeline of the day starting with the terrorists going through security early in the morning, then watching the events of the day unfold. It really brings you back to that day and not realizing what was happening at first, but then figuring it out, and being so shocked, sad, and scared. Another thing that was interesting was a little map they showed with all of the flights in the air at the time of the attacks - around 4,000, and then how they all slowly disappeared after the the entire U.S. was designated a "no fly zone." Seeing that map made me realize how 4 planes could just "disappear" and head for different locations. Overall, even though it's sad, it's definitely worth the time to go see the memorial and museum. 

After walking around the museum, we were close to the financial district, so we walked over there and checked out the New York Stock Exchange building. Then we headed over to the East River and and saw the Brooklyn Bridge. We then walked back to our hotel, through Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho, and Greenwich Village. We grabbed at gyro for dinner, and just took our time walking through all of the neighborhoods. We had to detour around the gay pride parade...which was basically all day, so our walk became even longer. 

We also saw a New York style Home Depot, which I obviously took a picture of, haha.

Once we made it back to our hotel, we were exhausted from walking so much and we went down to the hotel bar so we could have a few drinks...and a non-alcoholic beer for me! It was a very busy day, but we really saw so much and had a great time!