Day 282 - Midtown

Today we started off with breakfast at the Gramercy Café - we had an enormous plate of pancakes and bacon, accompanied by a mound of packs of maple syrup and butter. I managed about 2/3 of it, while Clare demolished hers with gusto, while calling me a wimp, I believe. Times Square was our first stop, on a quest for a Mets shirt for Clare, then we headed to 5th avenue to check out a couple of shops. I had booked tickets to see The Dark Knight at an IMAX, so we went into the Apple Store so I could check where exactly the cinema was. I soon discovered that I had booked tickets 30 miles away in Nyack, New York state, not just the other side of the park as I had thought. This was slightly annoying, and the only solution I could find was to discard those tickets as a lost cause, and book tickets for a cinema on Broadway for 10 this evening. This left us with some extra time, which we filled by first going into Trump Tower for a drink in the frankly rubbish Trump Bar. We had some good cocktails, but the ridiculously 80s pink marble and polished copper decor got tiresome on the eyes very quickly. Our next port of call was the Grand Central Station Oyster Bar, which would have been awesome if any of us had been having oysters. As it was, Clare got a rubbish looking salad, I had the blandest tuna steak I've ever eaten, and I forget what Pat had but it wasn't too good. Just to complete this rubbish day, we then went and queued around the Empire State Building for ages, which is an inexplicable tourist attraction. Well, one can see why it's popular, they just need to work on the efficiency of their system. We jumped the first queue as we already had tickets, then had to queue for the first lift, the picture we didn't want (but ended up getting because Clare loved how grumpy we all looked),  then for the second lift, then to get outside, then joined another queue to walk round the viewing platform, then to get back down to street level. All in all, quite cattle-like and depressing. The Dark Knight, however, was awesome. It was also extremely long, meaning that by the time it had finished and we had returned home, it was well past 1 and time for a sleep. With the exception of the last three hours or so, what a crap day that was.