Sometimes everything goes wrong, things collude together to spoil whatever it is that was planned.
However this was not one of those days, after raining on our parade (literally) the day before, we awoke to glorious blue skies – something we’d hoped would happen but weren’t ready to play the odds game on.
Like every other day we woke up at some unearthly hour, lacking the major ingredient of sleep we managed to drag ourselves outside and get one with the day without too much resistance from our bodies.
Once we were out in the bright Manhattan sunshine we walked about taking as many photos as possible, wandering around the odd shop that we happened to walk past on the way. On the way we saw a spectacular site – a steady stream of about 50+ Santa’s walking the streets waving and ringing bells…..Don’t ask me why but it was pretty funny to watch.
This is not the first time we’ve seen a group crazy people wearing red walking the streets, in DC we saw the same thing expect they weren’t Santa’s they were just people dressed in red running a mini marathon for charity….coincidence, I think not.
NBC Studio Tour
The previous week we’d booked tickets to go to the NBC Studio’s and go on a tour in the Rockefeller Centre. Before the tour we looked around the NBC shop to see what amazing stuff was there, and of course I just had to get the Studio 60 T-shirt and Baseball hat, in fact I probably would go as far as to say I would have bought the entire shop if everything had a Studio 60 logo.
I’ve never really been in a TV studio before so it was a great first time experience, the studio’s were pretty small and although I had no idea about the shows that they were for it was still a great way to spend an hour or so.
Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos so the only ones I have are of the outside.
Empire State Building
After the NBC tour and wandering around Time Square taking photos and grabbing a quick bite to eat we decided to head on over to the Empire State Building – thinking that there wasn’t going to be that long a queue since it was about 5pm).
3 Hours of waiting later – and after missing sunset we got up to the 86th floor, the sight was possibly the most spectacular of the entire trip – overlooking the entire of New York City.
After taking nearly 200 photos from what seemed like the top of the world we went back to the hotel and dumped all the shots we’d got so far onto our laptops to clear some much needed space for the next place on the list.
New York at Night – This City never sleeps
Knowing that we didn’t have much time left we hurried out with the intention of taking photos of Time Square at night, we packed our cameras, tripods and spare equipment and hit the sidewalk.
First thing was food, we hadn’t had much all day and we were pretty hungry so we decided to go to the ESPN Zone, an ESPN Burger later we were pretty full, the ESPN Zone is a pretty cool place, knowing that the great Nick Landry once visited.
When we’d finished we strolled outside and explored the hub of the city – Time Square.
It’s true what they say about New York, the city never sleeps, there is always things happening – shopping, entertainment – you name it there is probably somewhere open where you can do it.
While we were walking around we saw a few NYPD bikes parked up ready to spring into action, we asked one of the cops if we could get a picture on them.
We spent several hours walking around, taking photos and looking in the odd shop but soon it came time to leave – we didn’t want to but we knew if we didn’t we would end up walking the streets all night, by this time it was 2am and we were wide awake taking in the wonders we saw.
While waiting for the train to arrive at the subway station we enjoyed what was almost a mini concert, the guy singing was not your average homeless person, he was dressed very smart and seemed to be doing it because he enjoyed the music rather than anything else, it gave the station a nice community feel to it since everyone in their was mesmerised by his performance.