Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my wife and I attended the third annual GalaxyCon Columbus in the heart of Ohio’s very capital, met one of my all-time favorite performers, and…well, kinda wish we’d taken more cosplay photos. We also took photos of what we did before and after the show, but I left those out of the recap because most post-con Googlers rarely care about the little in-between moments and because 4500 words was already a hefty dosage of us without the scenes from the periphery.

Sure, cons are cool, but those little traveling moments are also our thing, especially when they happen someplace we’ve become fond of over time. We’ve visited Columbus quite a few times now — for this show, for the awesome Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, that time we tripped over a surprise Pokemon tournament, that other time I ordered a huge As Seen on TV burger, or when we spent my birthday checking out their children’s museum and their art museum, among other wonders. Columbus is a welcoming city with a thriving art community, close in size and temperament to our own Indianapolis hometown in many respects. If for some reason Indiana collapses and we have to relocate — like, say, when polio returns in 5-10 years and devastates our populace — Columbus is one of the top three places where I’ll consider seeking refuge, assuming they’re still standing when the rest of America collapses into a self-made black hole.

Same as in past years, we arrived in town early Friday before the show, parked at our preferred garage and walked up High Street for food and sightseeing in their Short North neighborhood.

(We have a Macaron Bar here in Indy too, but we don’t get to Mass Ave often.)

We left the con shortly before 7 and adjourned to our hotel ten minutes down the road, away from the presumable partying, which is usually not our thing. We switched to a different hotel this year, a newer model with modern flourishes such as a Jetsons-shaped table, a radio that had no alarm or clock or intuitive controls, a nightstand with built-in USB ports on each side, elevators that require you to push a floor button before you step in, and lamps set up for that irritating traveling game, Guess Which Switches Belong to Which Lights on the Far Side of the Room. We didn’t achieve 100% on that game till the next morning.

We didn’t really come away with any other cool food experiences. We grabbed supper three minutes from our hotel at a Chipotle swarmed by Ohio State University students inside and out, including a group of ten squatting in the lobby with takeout from nearby competitor Raising Cane’s. Service took forever and in hindsight perhaps 8 p.m. isn’t the best time for a brisket burrito as thick as your arm when you know you’ll be collapsing on your bed from exhaustion within the hour. Saturday morning we settled for the hotel’s breakfast options, pretty cheap but mostly toaster-oven fare. Lunch was from the convention center’s grab-and-go options, which we thankfully purchased shortly before the center’s entire wi-fi system crashed and shut down all credit-card purchases for a while.

On the bright side, the hotel’s beds were exactly what we needed, the parking was free, and the staff were friendly. The clerk who checked us in was an OSU student or grad, who recommended a particular museum to us that we’d visited before and already had plans to see again, as you’ll see in our final chapter of this very special Columbus miniseries!