A COUPLE are preparing for their seventh holiday in America - but this time the trip is courtesy of the Kent Messenger Group.

Mike and Gwen Whorlow, from Paddock Wood, were the lucky winners of the competition run on our website, Kent Online.

They won a five-day holiday for two in New York after Mr Whorlow correctly emailed with the answer of 1,454ft to the question: How high is the Empire State Building?

Mr Whorlow said: "We enter competitions from time to time, usually ones offering a travel prize, but we’ve never won anything as big as this before.

"We’ve travelled to the West Coast for the past six summers, hiring a car and touring right through from Arizona to Montana, but we’ve never been to the East Coast."

Mr Whorlow, a retired banker, admitted that he had had to look the answer up: "That’s not the type of thing I carry round in my head," he said.

He added that he and his wife were delighted that the holiday was being arranged through the company’s associated travel firm Headline Travel.

He said: "We’ve taken a holiday with Headline before, a tour down the Rhine, and it was excellent."

The competition attracted a total of 6,600 email entries and 134 text entries.