Okay, forget what I said about this being a small city. Today I went for a literal hike. In the city. Central Park is immense both in scale and in the enthusing sense. It would be great to see the place in late summer or autumn when all the trees are leafy and the colours rich. I thought I'd circumnavigated the boating lake, only to find it ran on into a whole other part more than twice the size beyond a bridge I was about to cross. I ended up by the Bethesda fo...

Awake at 4 am it's hardly surprising I got off to a flying start today. Thankfully there's a Starbucks in the Empire State building as I was slightly early. The views from the 86th floor observation deck are flawless enough that the 102 floor was just a disappointment. It was great to plot out the trek I would be taking over the rest of the day on a real map, accompanied by the sound of a fierce wind whipping round the tower. Heading off down Broadway, the Flat...

New York is wet. And windy. Not as windy as Carolina has been, but this is the last gusts of those crazy winds. It's also not as big as I was expecting, even vertically. I took the airtrain from JFK to Jamaica Station, then on to Penn station and walked past Macy's to my hotel, which nests in the shadows of the Empire State building. I was hoping to go straight up the Empire State that afternoon but couldn't see the top of it in the mists, so changed my plans...