On August 17, 2019, we traveled back to The Fight 93 National Memorial in Stoysville, Pennsylvania. This was our second visit to the memorial, and who so much has changed.
If you would like to watch the memorial video that we did for this location, please check it out below.
The park is not broken down into 3 areas. We stopped at the visitor's center first. This has been added since our visit in 2013.
The black path that you see (which is made out of coal granite, signifying that this area was at one time a strip mine) marks the flight path that Fight 93 took on September 11. It continues down over the hill towards the impact location.
Along the path there are darker granite strips indicated and memorialize the impacts times of all four flights that day. We walked out over to the edge of the overlook, that looks down at the impact and debris field.
Next we went into the visitor's center, and wow. The National Park Service really did a great job at this memorial. So much information, our video really did not do it justice. All we have to say is, "you need to put this place on your bucket list."
Next we drove down past the groves that they planted on our way to the memorial center. There are 40 groves of 40 trees and when those trees grow, it is going to be amazing.
The memorial center is were we visited before. Everything else in this post that we are talking about has been added to the park since 2013. In fact, they just stated working on the visitor center when we were there.
We walked down to the debris field and closer to the impact site and remembrance wall. I stopped for a moment and was looking out over the field to kind of get my bearings as to how far we walked down, and I noticed Marianne taking a photograph of me with the impact site off in the distance. I turned to her and asked her what she was doing and why she was taking my picture. She said, "You will see later".
I didn't plan this. I just grabbed a civil war shirt since one of our locations we were stopping after here was having a Civil War re-enactment. Marianne was moved to capture this moment on camera, and I'm very glad she did.
The wall of names has a panel for each passenger and crew member who was on board. It again, follows the path of the plan leading up to the visitor center and down to the impact site. The impact location itself is marked by a giant boulder. The families requested that it be place at the very spot so that nobody ever forgets what happened there.
One our way out of the park, we stopped by the newest and latest structure that was being built. We say being built, because it is not 100% finished yet. The Tower of Voices is positioned at the beginning of the park off of Route #30 so that it is the first and last thing you see when you visit the park. The tower is 93 feet tall (representing Flight 93), and it will eventually have 40 wind chimes once finished. This will make it the world tallest wind chime, and each chime will have a different tone.
As we stated before in this post, the National Park Service has done a great job with this memorial park. We will definitely be returning again in the future, and if you do get a chance to stop, please make sure you do that. If you have been to the park, please leave us a comment below and let us know about your experience and impressions.
One of the things we like to do when we visit places like this is by showing our support by getting some kind of token or memento in the gift shops, and there is always a gift shop. Besides getting a DVD and a book, we also got the following. An actually flag that was flown over the memorial and a pack of seeds from the flowers growing in the fields. Marianne is going to have her kids at school plant the seeds as a project this year, we will keep one pack as a memento.
If you like to visit the National Park Service website for this location, click here.
