With that, we headed down the gangplank to the pier and boarded the bus for the New York City finale: a mostly walking tour of (or what's left of, about a block) Little Italy, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, Soho, Union Square and Washington Square parks; the weird yet impressive Oculus, a mammoth combination train-subway terminal and retail shops and office complex; and what I most wanted to visit -- the 9/11 Memorial grounds, where honor is paid to the 3,000 who perished in the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
Encircled above by the names of the victims inscribed in bronze on the parapets, some marked with birthday flowers; the water disappears into darkness, symbolic of the void left in the souls of families, countrymen and survivors alike.
We did not see Central Park, a tentatively planned stop on the final tour; Manhattan's horrible traffic made that impossible, as the bus driver ended up getting us to JFK with little time to spare for lugging our bags through the airport's labyrinthine terminals to finally board our plane home to Utah.
After a half-hour's delay once more on the tarmac -- a bookend of flight frustration as it were -- we finally lifted off. It was near Sunday morning when, happy but exhausted, we landed in Salt Lake City, retrieved our luggage and got a lift home from our ride-share friend, Big Jim Coleman.
Be it ever so humble -- and to some, by comparison to the Big Apple mundane -- there truly is no place like home.
