What were you doing the morning of 9-11-2001?

[papapoopski]

My wife and I were in Maine starting our honeymoon. We stayed in a motel in Portland before our backpacking trip into Baxter State Park. I turned on the tv for some reason and saw the aftermath of the first plane hitting. The newscaster was silent which struck me as odd. We stayed glued to the motel tv until the 2nd building came down.

I called my mom knowing that my dad was going to be working in manhattan near the financial district that day. He didn't end up going in.

Then I called my brother who lived in manhattan. Took 2 hours to get through to him as cell phones were not letting calls go through. I cried when I heard his voice. We drove around maine with no direction, just sort of lost in a fog of wtf hearing about the PA flight and the pentagon.

It felt surreal to be where we were. On one hand happy to be together but wondering what kind of world our future would bring. We didn't understand what was happening. I remember thinking that we had what we needed to be away for months if needed. We decided to continue with our trip. Our family was ok, what else could we do?

As beautiful a trip as it was, when we came out of the woods we couldn't wait to get home and be near our families. On the drive back people were waving flags on the side of the road, flags were hanging from bridges everywhere.

Found out that the crew that hijacked the boston flight stayed in the hotel across the street from us on the same night. We were packing a backpack and beginning a new life together. Those 5 were planning the murder of thousands. I wonder what it would have been like to run into them. Would I notice something about them that was off?

The town that I live in in NY is full of NYPD and NYFD. Whole sections of my town are just cops and firemen from the city. It was overwhelming to keep hearing about the dead that I knew. I also heard many stories about "I was almost in the building".

If those planes hit an hour or two later the death toll would have been 10 times or more higher than what it was.

[gravitylover]

^^Or if they had hit the next day how much higher the toll would have been, It was the first day of school so lots of people take their kids in or wait with them for the bus. The next day there would have 20k more people in the buildings at that time. As I drove over the Bear Mt Bridge and Pkwy yesterday and realized again that one of the planes flew underneath it and ran down the Hudson Canyon right past Indian Point I couldn't help but think what could have been if it made a sharp left and took out the nuke plant that I was looking at that the plane was 1/4 mile from at 300mph. I live 18 miles downwind from that plant

We were getting our girls ready for their first day of preschool so I was home from work and had the tv on with the morning news. Within a minute of the first tower being hit everything went to live coverage and we were obviously bothered by the senseless loss of life from what we assumed was such a careless move of some dumbf*ck pilot flying into the tower. A few minutes later when I heard 'what's that? Another plane...' immediately my brain went to terrorist attack as the cameras focused on the plane flying into the second tower. I looked out the window because the guy across the street worked on something like the 90th floor and sure enough his car wasn't in the driveway so we knew he had gone to work that day. Turns out he left late and was on his way into the building as the plane hit so he turned around and left. He was different after that... and let his diabetes consume him to the point that it killed him. We knew a few people that didn't come home that day and a few more that aren't with us anymore due to 'complications' from things they were exposed to during the aftermath.