Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame 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, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…

After our amiable overnighter in Knoxville the next leg of our trip was roughly six hours to our hotel in Charleston, South Carolina — not including multiple stops, of course. The way our path worked out, it wouldn’t be our first state border crossing of the day: we took a 75-mile section of I-40 East from where it forked off I-75 until it connected to I-26, much of which intersected with the westernmost nose of North Carolina, a.k.a. “the High Country” through the Appalachians.

(Hindsight sidebar: a significant portion of this stretch was severely damaged by Hurricane Helene in September 2024, much of which only just reopened last month with limited access. Posting this travelog exceedingly late as I obviously am, I can’t deny the cognitive dissonance of revisiting our personal moments of touristy frivolity that happened fifteen months before the catastrophe, from which they’re still reeling today.)

We had light plans for the Tarheel State later in the week, but Day Two would give us merely a sample of the greenery to come…in the form of yet another welcome center seemingly competing in the imaginary Most Charming Welcome Center Contest that might explain the well-kept roadside amenities in Kentucky and Tennessee if said contest were real. I’m not sure if it’s a Southern Hospitality thing or a nationwide movement in the American welcome center industry, but we’ve had plenty of pit stops in our share of “official” scary dives over our past 25 years’ travels and these facilities were not what we’ve gotten used to dreading.

Anne enjoyed a lengthy chat with the info-desk attendant that doubtlessly spanned various historical topics relevant to the region. I didn’t take any notes except to note that Anne started it. One of her little joys on such trips is finding other folks knowledgeable in such matters who’re in a position to converse more intelligently than my own cabbage-headed self.

…and from there we bore deeply into the heart of South Carolina. For those interested, we did indeed return to North Carolina later in the week and spent a night, which we’ll cover later in this miniseries. Regardless, we were happy to cross two more Eastern Seaboard states off our to-do list, leaving only New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, and poor Delaware as yet untouched. We do hope to finish the rest of New England someday. As for now: onward toward more Southern history and cooking, not necessarily in that order.

As a heartening postscript: Knoxville NBC affiliate WBIR confirmed the Welcome Center has indeed reopened along with I-40, though with only one lane in each direction for the time being. Also, the bear statue survived.

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 BlueSky if you want to track my faint signs of life between entries. Thanks for reading!]