On September 11, 2001, my wife and I were living in Switzerland, having moved there in November of 1999. At the end of August of 2001, my sister Theresa and nephew Thomas joined us, they arrived from Seattle, we met them in Zurich and brought them home to Neuchâtel. We celebrated my 50th birthday, it was hot. I was on vacation, we went to tour around Ticino Switzerland then on into Italy via the trains for a few days. My sister and I wanted to see our fraternal grandparents villages, Lamporo and Senigallia, and see if we could track down any information about them.
We returned to Neuchâtel around September 8th. Theresa and Tom where due to fly out of Geneva on the 12th, I was supposed to fly out of Zurich to California for a business trip on the 12th as well. We spent time touring around home and enjoying ourselves.
Earlier that spring we received an message from my mother who had contacted my biological son. He and I had never met, he was adopted at birth in 1969. We initiated contact that spring and talked and emailed enough to where he wanted to meet us. We planned to meet with him during a business trip I was making on September 12th.
On September 11, my wife Athena was watching TV when the shows were interrupted with the news of the first plane hitting the Trade Center. It was mid-afternoon. Athena called her mom in Los Angeles and her mother wasn’t aware of what had happened. We called a few other folks on the west coast, checking to see if something else had happened that day.
We, like most everyone, were glued to the TV that afternoon and evening, watching the events unfold in New York city. The reporting was good on our local cable system, they piped in a lot of CNN and other US media. It was shocking, we watched the second jetliner hit the towers and the resulting chaos.
Later, I called our corporate travel people and was told there were no flights into the USA on the 12th, everything was suspended, I wasn’t going anywhere. On the morning of the 12th, Theresa and Tom left for Geneva after we discussed the chances of her getting out and she was determined to get a flight.
If she failed, they could return to us or stay in Geneva. Theresa, who is a force of nature, was able to change her booking from Seattle to Vancouver Canada where flights were still operating. That took some major work on her part at the airport, pulling all the strings she knew. But, she was (and is) a veteran traveler and got her and Tom on the flight to Vancouver. From there they would take a bus or ferry to Seattle and then she would go on to Mexico with her other son Alex to get him setup in a school there. She pulled it off somehow.
My meeting with my son was delayed a year but we met him and his wife in Seattle in 2002.
Our lives were not impacted by the events in New York until much later, when the cordon of security began to tighten worldwide. The feeling in Switzerland was that the new rules were being forced on the Europeans by the USA. For quite some time, you only had to go through a screening controls if you were going to the USA. If you were traveling inside the EU, it was much more informal.
Slowly, TSA personnel showed up at Swiss airports and took over all screening for American flights. I made my trip to California a few months later under the new rules. The EU stayed close to what it was before, with more metal detectors in use in the flight queues.