Final Day in NYC

Our last day in NYC we devised a master plan.  We would all go to Ground Zero together and then separate so that John could pick up the rental car while we visited the Museum of Natural History.  The first half of our plan went swimmingly.  The memorial at ground zero is incomplete and there is a lot of construction going on.  To me, the construction almost made it more meaningful knowing that it happened such a short time ago that they are still working on rebuilding it.

This tree is known as the survivor tree.  It was found in the rubble of  911 as an 8 foot stump.
It was nursed back to health and replanted at the memorial.

There are two identical water sculptures placed in the exact places that the towers were in with the same  outside dimensions.  I don't think they could have come up with a better tribute.  The names of the people who died are placed all around the outer perimeters of the 30 foot falls.

The motorcycle at the 911 Memorial Gift Shop that Paul Jr. from American Chopper made as a tribute.

After the Memorial we jumped on a subway and carried on with our plan.  The Museum of Natural History was 4 stories tall but we only made it to the 1st and 4th floor before we ran out of time.  There were some really cool displays.

This is a real meteorite

While we were blissfully soaking up mountains of knowledge at the same museum Night At The Museum was based on, John was having a little trouble at the car rental place.  It turns out that he lost his driver's license somewhere back in...Europe?  Unsurprisingly, National Car Rental would not release the car to him without one.  We had been planning on having him pick us up at the museum and then returning to the hotel to collect our luggage before heading out of town.  The kids and I had to make our way back to the hotel via subway and then hail a cab to bring us to the car rental place.  It's so strange that we should feel comfortable hopping into a car with a strange man just because his car has the word Taxi written on it.  That's what we did though and he turned out to be a nice man from Algeria whose only complaint about Americans was the way we pronounce our T's.  He has a point.  Once we arrived at the rental car place we had our car within 5 minutes.  Poor John had been waiting there for about 3 hours and was a little wound up.  Now it was 7:30 and we had a 6 hour drive before us.  Plus we needed to stop for dinner.  I wanted to stay in NYC for one more night and start out fresh the next day but John booked our hotel online and it was non refundable.  The happy ending to this story is that two negatives make a positive.  When John called the hotel to tell them we would be arriving late, REALLY late, they told him that they had no reservation for us until the next night.  Sweet!  We screwed up!  We get to pull over and get a hotel instead of driving all night!  Best mistake we ever made.