Maybe bad luck comes in fours...or maybe not.

Wednesday and we're up later than usual at about 10am for breakfast. The staff in the hotel restaurant, Zana's, are exceptionally friendly and my faith in New York starts to rise. A man came this morning and fixed the toilet for us, though I stand staring at it for ages each time I flush it now just in case. Dad rings the luggage office first thing and they tell him that one of our cases is on its way to the hotel and will arrive by 2pm at the latest, and the other case is still in San Francisco. They have no idea which is which - what a hilarious, fun mini-lottery we've got going on here.

We decide to head out for a walk to get our bearings. We walk no more than 5 minutes before we see the Empire State Building rising like a sentinel from the taxi-hooting, siren-blaring, people everywhere chaos and we decide unanimously that this is where we need to go first. This turns out to be the best decision we ever made because you can see the whole of Manhattan from the Empire State Building (well you can see much further, but that's a good place to start looking if your hotel is in midtown Manhattan), and that first visit has helped to guide us in all our travels ever since. Walking round New York is the best thing, you forget how far you've walked because there is so much happening all around you and it's the best way to raise your confidence in navigating the city (not that this is too hard). Once we've seen the city from the top of the Empire State building (with the help of Tony the Taxi Driver, our audio tour guide), whenever we're not sure about a destination or our whereabouts in the future, one of us invariably remembers, "Oh, I know, you remember when we were on the Empire State building, and the Chrysler Building was over there, and that means that we're here and so we have to go this way now!" And, oddly, it always seems to work! Walking in New York is far easier than navigating the RV in LA anyway. But so is saying the Chinese alphabet while drinking a glass of water backwards, standing on your head. Singing the national anthem. In Greek. With a German accent. Ok, I'll stop.

We only queue for about half an hour, which apparently is quite good as we speak to a woman later who queued for two hours. Sod that, I'd climb the bloody thing, it would take less time (don't even think of comparing me to King Kong, it's not funny). We take two elevator rides to reach the 86th floor (you can go as high as the 106th, but 86th seems pretty high to me, the acrophobic), wade through the unsurprisingly tacky gift shop and emerge, slightly battered through a glass door. Where I see the most amazing landscape I've ever seen in my life. Ever. If San Simeon was nature's symphony on this trip, the view from the Empire State Building is the human opera. Everywhere my eye moved there was so much to look at, a thousand questions (Well, actually one question, over and over - what's that? What's that? No, not that, that one over there! Although, now you mention it, what is that, too?) about what I can see. I forgot to be afraid of the distance to the ground, I just forgot. I fell in love with this oddly ordered architectural chaos, I fell in love with the tiny, crazy, indifferent people crawling the streets like ants, the little yellow toy taxi cabs, the endless spires and the rivers I still can't tell the difference between, the bridges and the names falling over themselves into my ears, of the various districts: Soho, Little Italy, Brooklyn, Queens, Hell's Kitchen, Upper East Side, Chinatown, Staten Island, New Jersey.

Amy and Dad disappeared, we all trailed round and round and round, looking again and again, out from each direction, walking past each other without noticing, or meeting up and excitedly asking, "Did you see this? Have you noticed that? Do you know what this is?"

I could rave on and on like this to you all for ages about it, but the pictures I took can tell you more than I can and they can't tell you all of it. I loved it. Amy has wanted to live in New York for a long time, she told me on the plane and dreams of moving there when she's older. I can think of nothing better than one sister in California and the other in NY! Eventually, we climb down from the Empire State, not literally, we got the elevator, and on the ground floor, I realise that it is actually a fully functioning building, an office space in its own right. There are 80,000 people who now work in the ES Building, but when it was first built, no one wanted to move in and local papers nicknamed it the Empty State Building (see what they did there?).

Now, here's something to make residents of Portsmouth think - drum roll please, and strap yourselves in -: theEmpire State Building only took one year and 45 days to build. Yes, folks, that's right. I just told you that THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, that's the 1,453 FEET HIGH skyscraper, took just over one year to build. I know what two words are running through your head right now: Spinnaker Tower. Well, what happened there? You know how high the Spinnaker is? About 558 feet. Almost a third as high, ten years from development to completion - what did we do wrong? They didn't have to shaft an entire city to build the Empire State Building, either. Go figure.

After the Empire State Building, it is late in the afternoon and we head for the shops. Five minutes from the Empire State building we are heading into Macy's (we knew how to get there because we notice it from the top of the ESB), which is huge!! Eleven storeys of shopping joy, we spend an hour and a half there and we don't get past the second floor! International visitors get a special discount card that entitles them to 11% off, which is great and before long, Amy has bought herself a bag by Guess which is her pride and joy now. Dad and I are gobsmacked - it's the first thing she's carried for the whole holiday. We'd both assumed that she was physically unable to use her hands and walk at the same time. I buy a cheaper bag to carry my presents to others and myself back home in (my luggage is so full that one of the sections has split open), it's a Macy's branded canvas bag, with red detail, and it's my pride and joy. It's huge and fits more books than my spine can handle. Result.

Next, we wander into H&M on 7th Avenue and again, we all split up to wander round at our leisure. I don't enjoy clothes shopping, as you know, but there's a sale on and that changes everything. I have two tops, an underwear set in magically bright purple and two more hats (hats are the new bags in my life) when I bump into Amy who is starry eyed and heading to the changing room with a pair of brown tailored crinkled shorts in her hand.

"Only $30," she sighs blissfully and heads inside.

I find Dad and we wait for a long, long, long time. So long, in fact that Dad has bought all his stuff, but I am waiting for Ames as she has our Amex Travellers' Cheque Card. We're waiting and waiting and waiting. I put my bag on the floor, which is growing into the tendons in my shoulder at this point. Dad moves over to the escalator in case Amy has left the changing rooms and is looking for us and I get tired and walk into the changing rooms to look for her, but there's no sign and I don't want to go to every one of the 20 cubicles calling her name because I have to share a room with her for the next four days and I can't face the trauma. I return and we wait for another ten minutes or so. I lose my temper and my last words to Dad are, "If she's touching up her bloody make-up in there, I'm going to cuff her til she's sick." At this point, she emerges from the changing room and she and I head for the checkout.

As we get to the escalator, I reach for my purse and can't find it. I can't find it because my bag isn't on my shoulder. I left it on the floor ten minutes ago before I walked off to find Amy. It's gone. I run back to where we were. It's gone. I walk to a million parts of the store I never even looked in. It's gone. My bag is gone. It has my passport, my purse, and my journal, my personal travel journal. And it's gone. We walk around and around the store. I ask every member of staff I can see, including the manager, they look for it with me. But it's gone. A guy called Carlos is finally assigned to my case and he clearly thinks I'm as green as I am cabbage-looking.

"You shouldn't have put it down," he says, with 20:20 hindsight and an observation I hadn't yet considered," It's not safe to leave stuff here."

We pass my Dad who has a face like thunder but is searching for the bag nonetheless.

"It's been stolen," he says, "Someone has stolen it."

"I know," I reply, miserably, and he softens and pats my shoulder. Amy suggests they go and ask downstairs and check with the staff, in case someone handed it in down there.

"Don't leave me!" I wail at my sister, and she runs back to my side. "Dad'll go, " she says and slips her arm round me. My eyes are wide and glazed with tears threatening to fall.

Carlos returns with another man (even in my panic a part of my brain recognises that he is good-looking - isn't it funny what you think of) and explains that he has to go downstairs and would this man, Dennis, help me?

"Of course. What's the problem, ma'am?"

I explain that I've lost my bag, where I left it and that it has my passport in it and a purse that contains nothing but $5. He goes off to put an alert out on the radio and I start to cry in my sister's arms, wailing, "My journal, Amy, my journal!" I think I'm more worried about this than I am about how the hell I will get back home without a passport.

Dennis returns, smiling. "I think I've found your bag. One of our staff picked it up."

He introduces me to a lovely, wonderful, intelligent and highly sensitive woman called Caroline, who explained that she had seen my bag, probably minutes after I left it and we walk downstairs together and she hands me my bag. My beautiful little green bag, with journal, purse and passport fully intact. I was very bloody lucky and I know it. I also cannot thank Dennis and Caroline enough, and swear my undying love for both of them. I'm not kidding. I offered to have Dennis' children. I can still hear them both laughing as we finally get to the checkout with our goods. In fact I can still hear them both laughing ten minutes later when we leave the store.

Dad and Amy never stop mentioning the bag saga, and I don't even care because I deserve it, because I'm lucky and because I've got a new underwear set in bright purple lace for under a tenner. And because I'm all in love with New York again.

By this time, we're ready for dinner. We eat at an Italian place and fall into our beds shortly after, exhausted.