Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every year since 1999 my wife Anne and I have taken a trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. We also like to travel on our respective birthday weekends — sometimes to comic conventions that just so happen to coincide with our celebrations of continued existence, sometimes to neighboring towns and states of significance to our interests. After being raised as virtual shut-ins, it’s been a joy to expand our horizons together, gradually and on a modest budget. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

Among our many recurring motifs are final resting places of Presidents of the United States of America. Anne is a major history buff whose vacation research leans heavily to famous American people, places, events, and artifacts. In our early traveling days, a few dead Presidents just so happened to be located near sites we were seeing for other reasons, or on the same convenient roadside. As we’ve diversified our directions over time and expanded the scope of what we considered a “point of interest”, the late leaders of our nation kept ranking on our to-do lists. They’ve basically become a long-term side quest for us. We earn no trophies or high-fives from imaginary teammates; we’re just seeing how many of them we can visit before we’re too old or broken down to continue.

To that end, this entry will serve as a long-term tracking document for our visits to those locales. Before we launch our next MCC travel miniseries, here’s a visual rundown of the graves, tombs, and crypts of our nation’s leaders that we’ve seen so far, in order chronologically by presidency and moving onward through the centuries. Some are massive structures and/or entire museums; some are simple tombstones in ordinary graveyards. We’ll add more as those travelogues are posted.

Among those not yet posted here:

• Franklin Pierce is way out in New Hampshire. We considered adding him to our 2022 trip while we were next door in Vermont, but didn’t use enough vacation days to reach him.
• LBJ and George Bush the Elder are in Texas, 160+ miles apart. Our first Texas trip back in ’04 was a punishing trial due to our inexperience across such a staggering distance. We expect next time will be better. Also, to be fair, Bush wasn’t dead at the time.
• Nixon and Reagan are 75 miles from each other but waaay out in California, which remains the ultimate Dulcinea of our road trip hopes and dreams, possibly to be reached someday after we’re both retired and have all the vacation days we’ll ever want or need.
• When we visited Washington DC in 2003 we weren’t yet collecting dead Presidents, so we overlooked Woodrow Wilson at the National Cathedral and, to our retroactive embarrassment, William Howard Taft right there in Arlington, probably a stone’s throw from JFK.
• Teddy Roosevelt is in southeasternmost New York, an easy half-hour drive northeast of LaGuardia. We could’ve driven there on our 2016 road trip, except that was our only annual summer vacation to date in which we didn’t bring a car with us. See, this is what happens when we fly instead of driving ourselves everywhere.
• We visited Gerald Ford’s Grand Rapids museum in 2002 before he died four years later. Now we have an excuse for museum photo retakes.
• Along with Washington, our afore-foreshadowed 2024 road trip (which is, like, three miniseries down the road) will also include belated guests James Madison, James Monroe, and John Tyler. Someday I’ll get around to sharing those!
• Ditto Andrew Johnson, an out-of the-way digression in eastern Tennessee on our 2023 road trip, which will feature later in the miniseries after the next miniseries.
• Jimmy Carter, age 99, cannot die because he and Keith Richards must both remain in this realm to maintain the delicate balance of power between the angels and the demons, lest all reality be rent asunder. Once the prophecy is fulfilled and both men are withdrawn simultaneously unto the next spiritual battlefield level, we plan to revisit Carter’s grounds on our way to the next Dragon Con after that.

Updates as they occur!

[LAST UPDATED 9/8/2024, 8:30 p.m. EDT. Total Presidents: 26 including Washington, who’s technically a spoiler because we haven’t serialized Our 2024 Road Trip yet…]