When I lived full-time in Brooklyn I had the worst time convincing friends who lived in Manhattan to come visit. Prospect Park! Neat stores! They kept balking, pointing to the long subway (or expensive taxi) rides, and I couldn’t blame them, having once been stuck at the Smith-9th Street stop at 2 a.m. because there was a “disturbance” in the next car. But still — frequently I wanted to say to them, “It’s not the end of the world, it’s the next borough.”

It wasn’t even the Bronx.

I was thinking of that Saturday night, as my boyfriend and I went up to see our friends in Duluth — a 40-mile round trip — for the second time in two days, and neither of us thought it unusual or overtaxing.