We started off our day in New York by doing something that, despite several trips to New York between us, none of us had ever done. We went to the Statue of Liberty. Now, this doesn’t sound momentous, but Lady Liberty and I have quite a history of missing each other. Every time I’ve ever been to New York, I have said that I wanted to see her. Every time I’ve been to New York, I’ve missed her, and for a variety of crazy reasons. This time, though, we were going to do it no matter what. We bought the tickets in advance a few weeks before we left home and were so pleased. Nothing was going to derail this. It was going to be GREAT! Mmm-hmmm, yessiree. However, we had reckoned without Hurricane Nate, who decided to pay New York a visit the same day that we did. Oh, we still went to the Statue of Liberty, but it was not the blue-sky, fairweather day we had planned on, to say the least....
Yep. This just about sums it up. However, despite the awful weather, we were blown away by the Statue of Liberty - almost literally!
Priscilla, I swear I can hear you screaming with laughter all the way over here in Morocco!!!!
We had bought pedestal tickets so we got to go inside the pedestal to see the original torch that was replaced a few years ago when the statue was refurbished. The old torch actually had glass in it and was lit from within. The new torch is plated with 24-karat gold and is illuminated at night by lights in the base of the torch.
From the top of the pedestal, we could look through a glass floor above us and see some of Lady Liberty’s superstructure and the spiral staircase that allows crown ticket holders to climb an additional God-knows-how-many stairs to get to the crown. Those tickets were completely sold out for the next three months and I can’t say that I was the least bit sad about that. Climbing almost 500 stairs is NOT mama’s idea of a fun vacay activity.
As part of our Statue of Liberty experience, we also stopped at Ellis Island. We were super pressed for time, having arrived an hour past our ticket reservation time due to bad weather, a three-hour subway/PATH Train/Hudson-Bergen Train/Uber oddessey to get from our hotel out by JFK all the way to the ferry terminal in New Jersey, so we didn’t really get to explore it the way we would have liked, but I did get a photo of the arrivals hall as it is now and a photo of an old photo of the arrivals hall the way it was when immigrants were arriving.
Thankfully by late afternoon, Nate was easing up on us a bit and we were able to make our way to the Freedom Tower and the 911 Memorial and Museum. We had a guided tour and it was worth every penny. What a sobering, gut-wrenching experience, but so interesting.
There are two identical fountains that sit on the footprints of the Twin Towers. They are surrounded by metal borders that have the names of all the 911 victims laser cut into them. At night, the names light up from inside.
Inside there are artifacts from the Twin Towers, lots of pictures, eyewitness accounts, a large room dedicated to the timeline, news coverage and statements the various flight crew members and passengers made to friends and family through phone calls before the planes crashed. I literally felt sick after going through that room. Absolutely gut-wrenching. There is also a room dedicated to the victims, including their pictures and information about each of them. Couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t.
Here are a couple of the artifacts on display:
This is the very last beam standing and the last to be removed during the clean-up and recovery efforts. PAPD 37 stands for 37 members of the port authority police killed. FDNY 343 stands for 343 New York firefighters killed. SQ 4 is where the bodies of four members of Squadron 4 were found. You get the idea. There are also photos of the missing and messages to loved ones that were killed.
This is a part of the huge antenna that used to be on top of one of the Twin Towers.
Just to give you a little perspective on how big this antenna was, this piece weighs 38,000 pounds and was but a small section of the antenna. Below are photos of the Twin Towers with the antenna and a drawing that shows the section of the antenna that this once was.
Pretty incredible. I had no idea that thing was so huge!
So after slogging through NYC, we headed back to the hotel for a good night’s rest so we’d be wide-eyed and bushy tailed for our flight to Morocco the next day. Good thing we all slept well that night because it would be a good 24 hours until any of us got more than a few winks of sleep here and there on our way to Morocco. And there’s really not much to tell about our first day in Rabat, Morocco because we were all so comatose, we could barely function. We tried to walk around a little near our hotel but finally gave it up after about 30 minutes (and before someone walked under a bus) and went and sat in the hotel lobby for a little while. I was so sleepy that I would start falling asleep every time I sat down for any length of time. I almost face-planted out of my chair onto the lobby floor three or four times before we all decided to break our cardinal travel rule and take naps. GASP!!!!!! We never, ever do that, but it was either that or keep on walking into walls, so we gave in to the urge and slept for a couple of hours before getting up and going to dinner and our orientation meeting with our travel group and guide. Then it was off to a lovely sleeping-pill-induced sleep in a nice soft bed and we were ready to get after it and take Morocco by storm in the morning.
Tomorrow we are traveling from Rabat to Fez by bus and I will do my best to write all about what we saw today in Rabat while we are enroute to Fez so that I can post another entry tomorrow, Fez hotel WiFi permitting.
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