A bite of the Big Apple

I write this from our hotel room in NY with a Budweiser at my side and life feels good. We're all completely wiped out from pretty much walking the streets of Manhattan for the last two days - after all, there's nothing like wearing out the shoe leather to get under the skin of a place!

New York's an amazing city. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have said I could happily live here for a while, but now I'm not so sure. It's exhausting... even sticking as we have to exploring Manhattan, the place is enormous, confusing and noisy (or is that just because we're here with three children?!) As far as the youngest of these is concerned, we've been on a metro, in a yellow cab and on a boat... not difficult to see where his priorities lie!

So what have we been up to? Well, we've managed to cram in a whole load in a short space of time, thanks to the above-mentioned transportation methods and much walking. I've loved the friendly chats of dog-owners, fellow-queuers and cab-drivers; walking along Fifth Avenue with the girls while the boys went camera-lens shopping; the amazing view from the top of the Empire State Building; even getting caught in the rain and sheltering for early supper in Little Italy! (We raised our glasses to wish you happy birthday mother!) Our hotel is reasonably close to the Met so we walked through Central Park to get there this morning and we've promised the children another trip there tomorrow morning. We all really enjoyed the boat trip to see the Statue of Liberty though I think Jemima's favourite thing so far has been the obligatory tour of the American Girl store next to Saks - 3 floors of girly retail nirvana.

Despite literally queuing around the block to get in - no thanks to an Alexandra McQueen exhibition that the whole of New York turned out to see - we all really enjoyed the Met this morning, but as a marketer and a recent visitor to the National Gallery in London, couldn't help feeling that they'd missed a trick. It seemed infinitely harder to navigate around and the childrens' audio guides lacked the sparkle and humour of their UK counterpart, but grimble grumble ... still an amazing place full of treasures. I particularly enjoyed the Warhols and Liechensteins we saw, Iain dithered around the Van Goghs while Rosie remained unimpressed with some of the very abstract modern paintings ("I could do better than that" - actually in many cases she was right, clever girl). Most impressively, Ted recognised a Rothko and a Jackson Pollock from Kings' Dubai Art Weeks so hats off to Debbie Watson!

Meals have been a good mixture, and none of them dull. Had lunch near the World Trade Centre building site today - what a vast empty space, gives you goosebumps - and eggs, fresh orange juice and coffee for breakfast this morning in a 'proper' American diner. Off any minute now to Times Square now we've rested a bit to see what we can find and enjoy 'the lights'.

Just about getting over the jet-lag now I think... was horrid yesterday when we were all up and raring to go by 5.30am and then seriously flagging by 7pm! Still, we shouldn't push our luck and hang out here 'resting' too long or we'll never summon up the energy - can't waste our last night in the Big Apple, especially when it's time to eat - again!

Bon appetit and will be in touch in Washington. Watch this space for some NY pics from Iain first...
Emma x