New York - Day 2

On our first full day in New York, we headed out early. Unfortunatly, it threw it down. Heavily. (We finally found a street vendor selling umbrellas half way through the day and gave in. The umbrellas are rubbish but for $5, they kept us drier for the rest of the day.)
Breakfast was on Lexington Avenue at a very posh hotel restaurant (our only posh breakfast after we saw the final bill) but it was very nice. Caroline's pancakes were massive!

Caroline's Pancakes for posh breakfast.

First we went to the Empire State Building. At this point the weather wasn't too bad. They did warn us there was "limited visibility" at the top. They meant "You will see nothing!".

View from the top of the Empire state - when cloud "cleared"

New York is out there. Honest. Somewhere.

You can just about see the river.

Wind swept!

The Empire Statue building is 104 stories of office space and was built in 1 year and 137 days! It was finished in May 1931, a month ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, the depression was in 1929, and most of the business which were going to have offices there had gone bankrupt as they built it. It was made Famous in 1933. By the film, King Kong. After that, it was so popular they converted the top few floors to observation decks, and plenty wanted offices there.

We didn't see it on the best day, but it was still fun.
Then we headed to one of New York's Museums. Not one of the art ones, granted but the Museum of sex has some interesting exhibits! :-) The world is a kinkier place than I thought!

Dolphins doing it differently. 

Gay lions

After that, we went shopping at Macy's (didn't buy anything but was fun to look around - it's huge!), Victoria Secret (very cool), and some souvenir shops where I got my Statue of Liberty Rubber duck. :-)
We also went to Gap as I needed new jeans (I managed to split mine yesterday!)
At the end we took the tour bus on the Downtown tour and just found out a few more things about Manhattan. Like it is much larger than it used to be as most of the south tip ad east side is landfill. Which is one of the reasons that area was so badly badly effected by Hurricane Sandy - a lot just washed away. Most of the rest of the island is built on a type of granite. The granite disappears deeper down mid island, so the skyscrapers are built in the north and south (as cheaper to anchor to bedrock than dig huge foundations) and the middle part has lower buildings.

When we got back we crashed for an hour and went out for tapas and wine. Then cocktails. Then to the wine bar next to our hotel for some lovely glasses of Pouilly Fume and then a glasses of Alsace Riesling. Very nice (and I was educating Caroline in wines which is my excuse and I'm sticky to it). We were rather tipsy (which made the climbing up the ladder to my bed very tricky - getting down when I forgot something was even harder!)