So we move out of the city on Tuesday, take Wednesday off, and then we’re back on Thursday staying at the Soho Grand for my wife’s birthday weekend.

And it was interesting.  We got a room in a completely different section of the city, down  at the bottom of Soho near canal.  It was a great opportunity to see the city from a different perspective. I forgot how much I like Soho, where I haven’t really spent time in the past few years.  It’s a very “Manhattanish” neighborhood, if that makes any sense. (And I got to check out the new High Line Park in Chelsea on the far west side, yet another way Manhattan is taunting me as I move away.)

Sadly, you can take the couple of the Upper West Side, but you can’t take the Upper West Side out of the couple.  Between a doctor’s appointment, an event at the Met, her birthday dinner, some lingering work appointments, and a party at the rooftop of the Empire Hotel, we made no fewer than six cab rides from Soho to the west side above 42d street.  I’ve spent years and years in cabs going from my uncool uptown neighborhood to downtown parties and events, so I finally become a downtown person (for a weekend) and end up spending the whole weekend handing cabbies twenties and getting back change.  I want to thank my friend Mike for waiting 15 years to throw a party on the UWS, waiting it out until the first weekend I no longer lived there.

The weekend does show the way for a recovering Manhattanite to come to a soft landing. This was a splash out weekend, for her birthday, but it is entirely possible to find a reasonably (for Manhattan) priced room, cobble together a series of things to events (hopefully that don’t require cross-island cab rides) , and have a Manhattan weekend now and then to recharge those batteries. I think the problem a lot of Manhattan exiles have is that they promise they’ll come back to the city, but let themselves sink into a suburban stupor of easy evenings at the local restaurant and an early movie rather than a 45 minute trip over a bridge and to a $60 parking garage.  I know that’s what we went through in our trial exile in 2005 when we were doing renovations, so I hope that we keep this commitment to come into the city regularly to keep that part of ourselves connected.