The first day of the UN General Assembly is one of those days every year that you both look forward to and dread. With so many world leaders coming to New York to give a speech you know there will be always be news associated with the GA. The problem is very little changes at the UN from year to year and the pictures, of which thousands are shot every day, all tend to look very much the same.

This year we were all looking forward to the first address to the GA by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and as expected he delivered a photo-rich speech for the photographers in attendance. It was one of those speeches that was hard not to get a good photo from no matter where in the hall you were shooting.

We placed three photographers in the assembly hall in our normal left-center-right positions. Everyone had photos of him waving his arms around, gesturing, holding up a book, throwing a book and waving his speech in the air.

However I am not sure anyone was prepared for a speech that lasted over one and a half hours. After looking through hundreds of frames of just Gaddafi, it wasn’t hard to stop and focus on a picture that instantly grabbed my attention of him drinking a glass of water while the President of the 64th session of the General Assembly, Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki of Libya, rested his head in his hand.

It just seemed like the perfect picture to illustrate how long Gaddafi actually spoke for. The photographer shot it as a horizontal with three people listening in but also cropped into a nice vertical, giving us the chance to offer it two ways to fit two different holes in a newspaper or on a web site.

Photo credits:

Top: Mike Segar; Combination photo (L-R) Ray Stubblebine, Mike Segar, Mike Segar; Bottom: Mike Segar

Having covered the events of 9/11 and 6 of the last 7 memorials, this year was very different. In the past I had a very hard time covering these memorials emotionally. It was tough seeing these people grieving the loss of loved ones and having, not even through six degrees of separation, known anyone that passed away hard to grasp. But year after year we have gone down to the site to mark the anniversary of one of the worst attacks on American soil in history.

This year it seemed different. For me, it seemed not as emotional as the years past. With less exceptions people seemed to be getting on with their lives to a certain extent. I also noticed how the kids of the victims are getting older - not nearly as many babies and younger children. Seven years have passed and the children are growing older. I also think that the presidential candidates visiting the site took some of the focus away from the families’ and loved ones’ day of mourning. It became a separate story to cover other than the anniversary.

With the hopes of seeing a slice of Americana and a desire to get back to the Big Easy, I thought what better way to get to see the country than take a Greyhound bus. My trip, which originated at Port Authority in New York City and was to end in New Orleans, covered 1,400 miles, 15 scheduled stops and 4 bus changes.
As hoped I met some really interesting characters along the way : A man who claims to have staged a pre-meditated suicide in hopes of claiming a new identity, a pastor who has fathered 13 children, a kid who hiked the whole Appalachian trail by himself, a marine who claimed to have not been home for 6 years and was returning to New Orleans via Boston to see his six-year-old daughter for the first time and his wife, amongst many other people who if I dared to approach I’m sure had their own stories to tell.

I left Port Authority at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday (8/12) and arrived some 31 hours later on time in New Orleans at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday (8/13). Along the way we made a few meal stops as they were called and I have to admit I see why America has an obesity problem. The only food options at these stops were McDonald’s or random other stops that had the options of Fried Chicken with or without fries. Unless you were packing your own meals, healthy options were few and far between.

Sleep was tough. The first bus I was on was pretty comfy, however, when we switched to a Carolina Tramways bus chartered by Greyhound it was far from comfortable. A school chair had more cushion that these seats and unfortunately it was the longest non-stop leg of the trip. Once in Atlanta, we changed buses to what felt like a Rolls Royce compared to tha old bus and I was able to get my only 3 hours of sleep along the way.
Seeing the night come and go was great and I really knew I was in the south when we stopped in Opelica, Alabama for a meal and ordered some good ‘ole salt cured bacon, grits and sweet tea. Getting close to New Orleans I chatted with a bus driver and reminisced about Katrina. She was telling me how she drove Greyhound buses to evacuate the people days after the storm and I remembered being on one of those flooded overpasses myself watching these people finally being taken out of that dire situation.

Arriving in New Orleans I was glad to be off the bus, however, I felt a little sad that my visual journey of 30 some hours had come to an end. That feeling left quickly after getting dinner at my favorite oyster joint and falling to sleep on a nice bed for 12 hours.

View a slideshow of Shannon’s trip here.