Once we again we’re winding down another travelogue with chapters nowhere near as exciting as the ones in the middle. The very design of our vacations and my insistence on chronological storytelling together mean pretty much every MCC miniseries ends anticlimactically. Not once have we driven 4-to-20 hours out of town and scheduled the biggest and best attraction as the very last thing we do on our way home. If you’ve remained a longtime reader, I trust you understand the nature of the pastime.

Cleveland first appeared in our lives in 2004, when my car broke down on our way home from Niagara Falls. C-Town had a stronger costarring role in our 2013 adventures, replete with stops at a rockin’ museum, a Christmas movie house, an iconic comic-book legend’s house, the second-tallest Presidential burial site we’ve seen to date, and a memorial statue I helped fund. That was a good set of experiences.

This year, Cleveland was an anticlimax again. In some ways it wasn’t their fault. Some ways.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip each year to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. We’re geeks more accustomed to vicarious life through the windows of pop culture than through in-person adventures. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any surrounding areas that also had comics and toy shops, we chucked some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own, from the horizons of nature to the limits of imagination, from history’s greatest hits to humanity’s deepest regrets and the sometimes quotidian, sometimes quirky stopovers in between. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2022 we wanted the opposite of Yellowstone. Last year’s vacation was an unforgettable experience, but those nine days and 3500 miles were daunting and grueling. Vermont was closer, smaller, greener, cozier, and slightly cooler. Thus we set aside eight days to venture through the four states that separate us from the Green Mountain State, dawdle there for a bit, and backtrack home…

After the long traffic snafu around Erie we were all too happy to arrive at our hotel for the night in downtown Cleveland. At the penultimate step in the directions we suffered yet another setback when we found to our resurging annoyance that the sometimes all-knowing Google Maps had failed to detect a key road closure for a construction project right in our way. I drove two long, full laps around a clutch of Brutalist-looking blocks and got so frustrated in our search for the elusive final step that I pulled into a random parking garage just so I could stop the car and call the hotel to reconfirm their location and existence. Eventually I realized we were being stymied by a poorly labeled 5-way intersection and nailed the turnoff on the next lap. Thankfully the garage didn’t charge us for the three-minute interlude.

Fun personal trivia: our Cleveland reservation was the first time in our lives we’ve ever redeemed hotel-membership points for a free night’s stay. You’d think we would have thousands more banked after 23 years’ worth of road trips, right? Until the pandemic I’d never thought about it. In most areas of commerce we’ve never been ones for brand loyalty. We’ve stayed in just about every known hotel chain in America, from Days Inn to the Omni, all without any greedy urge to save up for freebies. Early in 2022 I noticed we’d accumulated so many Marriott points that I figured, why not take advantage? Why not shave some expenditures, put a little more space into our budget, and treat ourselves on the last night before home? It’s what Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford would’ve done.

The friendly staff ushered us weary travelers in and handed us a welcome letter with our keys. We rode upstairs and walked into the second-smallest room of this entire trip, maybe five or six square feet larger than our cozy Waybury Inn accommodations. We found scarcely more outlets for gizmo-recharging than that rustic B&B had had. The dearth of power sources might’ve explained why the previous guests had unplugged the TV’s power cord from the wall. We were less certain why they’d also unplugged the cable box’s HDMI cord from the TV.

Then we read the welcome letter and realized this rather fancy-looking hotel was having the same 2022 as the rest of us. This wasn’t our first Pandemic Year 3 encounter with a business whose front-line message was “Please have mercy upon us!” We did! We normally do! With, like, every employee we encounter in retail or restaurants! Anne and I have a combined 69 years in customer service industries between the two of us. We get it. It’s just weird and sad to us how so many customers have apparently become frothing wildebeests that businesses nationwide have gotten proactively defensive for the sake of their own safety and sanity.

In general the stay was otherwise fine, but we plan to be much choosier about our next redemption of our Marriott points. In fact, as of this writing we already know where we’ll use them next. We’ll get to that discussion in our next road-trip miniseries. First we have to finish this one.

We were exhausted and weren’t up for a long drive to dinner. A few options were within walking distance. It wasn’t a charming stroll. The streets around us had a spooky ghost-town vibe that reminded me of Indianapolis after the 2020 riots. What few residents we spotted were mostly loitering as a single clique in nearby Cleveland Public Square, radiating a hivemind ambiance that said in so many glares, “Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya? Best not be outside at night.” We didn’t aim to linger or scope out their historic statues. We were just hungry.

We donned our firmest big-city defensive scowls for the five-minute beeline to a famous joint we’d never tried before: Wahlburgers. It isn’t a house of exotic delicacy. It isn’t native to Cleveland. We never watched the reality show that explored and promoted it. We’re not diehard fans of either famous co-founder Mark or Donnie Wahlberg, and I still grimace whenever I remember the time I attended a free advance screening of Broken City. (Each has done some good stuff in their lifetimes, I’ll grant.) This wasn’t even our first time being near a Wahlburgers — there’s one forty minutes from our house, but in an area of town we rarely visit nowadays; and we walked past their Atlanta store the last time we attended Dragon Con. As of today they have over 90 locations. They’re no longer a rarity in the wild, strictly speaking.

But the important thing is, they were there. And open. And deserted, except for the staff and maybe two other customers. As an added bonus, the food was genuinely really good. Our only complaint was that our otherwise gracious server forgot all about our appetizer until after she’d brought out our main dishes. Never mind the irony that this was our first time ordering an appetizer anywhere all week long. So the appetizer became our dessert. For the space of that night, chef/co-founder Paul Wahlberg was our favorite Wahlberg.

All told, I’d rank this dinner in the top half of our vacation meals. Our contentment notwithstanding, we still didn’t dilly-dally around the streets on our way back to the hotel. No one approached us or made any sudden moves, but it felt less like the ordinary calm of a quiet evening and more like a tenuous detente negotiated long before we showed up. We recognized that mood from elsewhere around 2022. We definitely weren’t in Vermont anymore.

DAY EIGHT: FRIDAY, JULY 1st.

The next morning was much more congenial outside. A handful of office commuters flitted here and there, still no teeming masses in sight. Before checking out, we took a walk down the way and through the construction site to Fort Huntington Park for a quick spot of sightseeing, mostly in statuary form. The primary objective for Anne the history aficionado was their statue of Jesse Owens, the amazing athlete who grew up in Cleveland and later made the Nazis look stupid at the 1936 Olympics.

After checkout and departure we stopped for second breakfast at Jack Frost Donuts — an authentically local, family-owned small business serving cake donuts in Cleveland since 1937. Their homemade goodness brought some balance to our dining itinerary.

…in conclusion, Cleveland is a land of contrasts. And we weren’t done with Ohio yet.

To be continued!

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[Link enclosed here to handy checklist for other chapters and for our complete road trip history to date. Follow us on Facebook or via email sign-up for new-entry alerts, or over on Twitter if you want to track my faint signs of life between entries. Thanks for reading!]