Just got back from a wild holiday weekend in that thrilling metropolis known as Manhattan–perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Living in Queens, even the first neighborhood into Queens, it’s easy to lost sight of the glass-towered shores of Manhattan. As I might’ve mentioned many times before, we have excellent restaurants and fine friends, as well as a giant movie theater, right here in Asssss-toria.

Peter and I had intended to actually leave town for the weekend, but we were gripped with indecision in the face of too many train schedules. Plus, I was a bit burnt-out from my Mexico jaunt.

Then Peter hit on the genius solution: We would check in to the Winslow Place B&B–in which the B’s stand for the ‘bed’ in our ‘basement.’ So we packed up our bags, walked downstairs and locked the door behind us.

TripAdvisor reviews for Winslow Place praise its lax “hands-off” approach to hosting, but criticize its equally lax standards of housekeeping, its less-than-cohesive decor and its ridiculously small shower.

I’m fresh from the finest resorts the Riviera Maya has to offer, but I’ve gotta say, the place wasn’t bad. Remarkably homey, with some very nice (and novel!) amenities, such as a bottle of wine, some bananas and a cribbage set by the bedside. There was also a full Dance Dance Revolution setup, which I think must be unique to this B&B. And you can fit two people in the shower if you’re really, really careful.

During the day, we actually went…into…Manhattan! Mostly it was to see movies, but we fit in some other culture, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We had drinks at the Ritz-Carlton in Lower Manhattan, and took pictures of the Statue of Liberty, while one of the bar employees danced around behind us to “Fascinated” (he thought no one could see him, but he was reflected perfectly in the floor-to-ceiling windows). We had more drinks, and really good food, at Employees Only, where we’ve been meaning to go for something like a year and a half (the owners, incidentally, live in Astoria); we were also horrified at the well-groomed-but-still-ugly-mob bar scene of Friday-night West Village.

And we even bought a sofa. Which nearly punctured the fabric of fiction that was swaddling our little weekend getaway…but fortunately, it’s not being delivered until Wednesday, which gives us a lot of time to settle back into our real home in Astoria. Amazing how cheap the delivery fee is, considering just how far away we were when we bought it!