Tall, Tall, Tall as big as a Wall, Wall, Wall...*

I think if you've never been to New York before, and I hadn't, I'm not sure any number of photographs, scenes in films, news reports, stories from other people etc., prepare you for actually being there, the actual impact of what you see at street level, what you see when you look up...

It may sound crass and predictable and touristy, but the city has a "Wow" factor which perhaps nothing prepares you for. In fact, I guess it'll still be there when I go a second or third time. Which I will.

So, let's start by getting in the queue for the city that never sleeps...



It's the Empire State Building and it's iconic New York. Photos don't do it justice. They don't make it look as tall or omnipresent as it is in real life. And at the back of your mind is always the reason it's now, once again, the tallest building in the city.



Quick tip... don't bother to book tickets in advance on the website. You don't get to skip the main queue, just the ticket booth, which saves you about three minutes out of two and a half hours.

So, up the lift, and here's the reassuring, "Oh bugger, we're 86 floors up, I wonder if it's safe..." view you get when the doors open...



Please excuse our appearance while we make our visitor facilities even better... And is that another queue to get outside? Yes! Never mind, queues don't worry me. I've tried to buy a newspaper at WHSmith in Southampton on a Saturday morning enough times to know a life-sapping queue when I see one, and this wasn't it.

So, outside and Manhattan is spread out before you just like it is on the postcards, in the films, just like it's supposed to be... There's hundreds of photos to take, each one only slightly different to the next (and I took them...) and each one only slightly different to the ones taken by everyone else who's been up there.

But here's a few anyway... by day...



...and by night...



...and no, I didn't go up there twice, it just got dark.

It's a great place to go within a few hours of getting to the city, 'cos (a) it gets the longest queue you're likely to stand in the whole time out of the way early and (b) you get your bearings and see where everything else you're going to see actually is.

But it's not the best view of the city. More about why another time.

* Fetch more water, fetch more sand...