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| Where was I on September 11th? My wife and I were traveling in Europe, with only our
backpacks and train tickets. We were in a small town in the German Blackforest called Triberg. We were staying at a small family run hotel, I suspect we I have done a lot of traveling in my life, and have always had wanderlust, but never have I felt so very far from home as I did that day. It is forever etched into my memory. The sights, the sounds, the feelings. Editor
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the only guests at the time. We got up that day, walked down town, had lunch.
After lunch I remember having cake and coffee. (we did that a lot in Germany)
Then we went shopping for a cuckoo clock. Around 3pm or so we started back to
the hotel, walking slowly, enjoying the sun, the smell of evergreens and
watching all the tourists go by. When we arrived at the hotel we were met by
this little old lady, who rushed out into the lobby screaming in German. Our German
is a little rusty but we made out something about terrorists, a bomb, and
New York City. She was the mother of the hotel owner. Finally she took us by the
arm into the owner's apartment where they had a large screen TV, tuned to a German
news channel. The TV was getting a feed from CNN, the video was showing
an aerial shot of Manhattan. The entire downtown section of the city was covered
by what looked like smoke as high as the skyscrapers, and spilling out across
the harbor. We didn't know about the towers, or that they had just collapsed. I
could understand enough German to realize that they were talking about the
possibility of tens of thousands of dead, and I thought "My God, just how
big was this bomb?" I honestly thought that maybe someone had nuked them.