So with Bin Laden dead....

Maybe because of the gas tank I mention in post #50, our campus was evacuated.

I was preparing to go to my kindergarden. And I tried to talk about it (I guess in extremely primitive and basic terms) with other kids there, but obviously none of them really seemed to understand.

I was teaching that week in Vancouver BC. I got up that AM and did not turn on the radio or TV. Drove to work with the radio off (only 3 blocks)
As I was pulling cars out of the garage one of them had the radio on, the DJs were talking about someone trying to crash a plane into the White House. I only heard maybe 30 seconds of this, and I thought “Yeah, right like that could ever happen.”
About 30 minutes later, I got a call from the instructor in Toronto. He asked if I had seen the TV?
No I replied, why?
OH shit they are crashing planes into the World Trade Center!
Whaaaaat?
I turned on the computer (dial up) and started to surf.
My students arrived, and I gave them the option to leave, but they said teach.
So I taught. I remember a couple of times being in the middle of an explanation and my mind going completely blank as my thoughts turned to current events.
That had never happened before, or since.
We cut out early that day and I went back to the hotel and watched TV half the night.

Much has been written about how the people on the East coast of Canada took care of stranded travelers. I was on the other side of Canada and they also did an incredible job. At one point during the afternoon of 9/11 the police had to close the road to the Vancouver airport as so many people were just showing up to offer a bed or two.
Hotels, churches, and OG only knows where else put up stranded travelers.
Awesome job.
I was stranded in Vancouver until the following Monday evening when i got to fly home.
During that weekend, I had to get out. So I took a car and headed up north from Vancouver. About an hour or so North of West Vancouver, I got off the freeway to grab a cup of coffee in a very little town (3 streets, no stoplights).
As I was driving down the main drag, I see the Canada Post Office. On the roof was an American flag flying at half mast with the Canadian flag underneath it.
This blew me away. That someone would take the time to find an American flag and put it on an offical building, well it overwhelmed me. I pulled over and cried.
Canadians are pretty damn awesome in my book.

I wasn’t due back at college for another week, so I was sleeping in. My alarm clock went off at 9:32 and after a couple of minutes of Don Imus I realized they were talking about a major incident - like a lot of people, when I heard a plane had hit the Twin Towers, I assumed it was a small plane and that something had just gone wrong. When I realized there was an attack and serious damage had been done, I got up and turned on the TV.

I was working. At a major British military aerospace company. Things got busy real fast. We had armed guards the next day.

I was in Reno too! Odd.

We’d flown in (unusual…we usually drive) for a 3 day R&R. 9/11 was our day to go home, and I woke up & turned on the news while packing. The towers had already collapsed, and it took what seemed forever to figure out what the hell was going on.

We were now stranded in Reno…the hotel comped all their guests for a night’s stay. All the monitors in the casino that were usually turned to sports were turned to CNN.