Saturday Night Bright Lights...

On Saturday Abi and Alice went off on the Sex & The City Tour (surprisingly, I wasn't invited?!), so once they'd finished with all that business we all met up in the village at Lombardi's for one of their 'world famous' and incredibly tasty pizzas.

We had a huge meatball, pepperoni, pancetta, red pepper and garlic spinach one, that didn't last very long at all once it was put on the table.

To work off the delicious meal, we walked from Mott Street all the way up to the Empire State Building (that's a couple of miles!) to go up to the top and enjoy the view.


As we were walking up Broadway we saw a helicopter flying quite low through the buildings, approaching the Empire State Building. It got really close to the building, so close people who were at the top must have been able to see right into the cockpit. It must have been pretty scary to be up there and see the helicopter coming for the building. It wasn't very clear why the helicopter got so close, or hovered alongside the Empire State Building, but it went away and didn't come back again.

When we finally got to the entrance of the building, there was a big queue, a queue to join a queue! We were just about to go in the doors when a man offered us his tickets to go up to the 102nd floor, when we said thank you he said 'You won't be thanking me when you see the queue!' He and his family had gone up to the 86th floor but couldn't be bothered to wait in the queue for the 102nd floor.

We took this warning and decided to walk a little further, head to Times Square, go and see a film and then within the next couple of hours the queues might have died down a bit.

It was perfect really, as Alice hadn't seen Times Square at night yet, and we were a little achy after walking all that way on a full tummy - so sitting in a lovely cool cinema was ideal. We went to see Horrible Bosses which has just come out over here. It was VERY funny and good fun - if it's out back at home I'd recommend going to see it, I think you'd enjoy it.

It was about 12.30am by the time we got out of the cinema, the perfect time to go the top of the Empire State Building, so we walked back down to 34th to find all the queues had died down and we were able to go straight to the very top...

The view was just as beautiful as always.

Although we've been up the Empire State Building a few times, it never gets boring - how could it? Looking over Manhattan and Brooklyn, seeing the Chrysler Building all lit up, seeing the glowing lights of Times Square rising to the skies, and seeing the Statue of Liberty's torch all lit up in the distance... it's beautiful.