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…

It’s been a while since we had an excuse to post a basic photo gallery of pretty flowers. As it happens, our Charleston trip gives me that excuse. We came for the giant trees As Seen On TV; we stayed for the blossoms. And for some ice cream.

After our long morning and mid-afternoon along Charleston Harbor and in their historic downtown, our final attraction for the day took a short drive northeast to Mount Pleasant, a town within Charleston. The route was our first (and not our last) excuse to drive across the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge that we’d seen earlier from afar. We’ve seen cable-stayed bridges elsewhere such as Boston or even an hour south of us in Columbus, but I can’t help marveling every time.

Next stop was Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens, a historic farm still in operation and managing just fine without enslaved labor nowadays. Its centerpiece is a mansion built in 1936 by Canadian ambassador Thomas Stone, labeled on their map as the “Big House”. More impressive to us was the Avenue of the Oaks — a nearly mile-long entrance road flanked on both sides by rows of trees that were reputedly planted in the mid-18th century and live to this very day. The mansion may be familiar to the millions of movie lovers who’ve seen The Notebook. That doesn’t include us, but maybe it means something more to you?

Other works shot on the grounds include such TV miniseries as North and South and that adaptation of Scarlett we all agreed never to speak of again. Supposedly the June 1, 1984, episode of the immortal soap opera Days of Our Lives featured scenes set there, but we’re having trouble confirming that, even through bootleg resources. (It might’ve been that episode where Bo spirits Hope away from her wedding to that skeevy Larry Welch, they ride his motorcycle while “Holding Out for a Hero” blares at us from Hell’s cheesiest speakers, and then they go argue in front of some trees for a while. Or maybe those were someone else’s trees? The world may never know!) In more recent times, celeb power couple Blake Lively and Mint Mobile spokesman Ryan Reynolds held their 2012 wedding ceremony there. So we basically walked in Deadpool’s footsteps.

We opted out of the Big House tour and mostly were in the mood to wander the outdoor acreage of our own accord. What drew our cameras’ wandering eyes more than anything else were the Formal Gardens, a pair of plots catty-corner to either side of the Big House and filled with various beauteous flora, some of them helpfully labeled. I tried nailing down the names of dozens of flowers we photographed, but my flower identification skills are too pitiful to qualify for “amateur” rank. Lots of these are missing their specialty modifiers, subspecies qualifiers, Latin appellates, and superhero aliases. Most of these captions are therefore necessarily too simplified, but do feel free to chime in with your horticultural know-how if you recognize an extremely specific breed near and dear to your heart. I’m sure it’s what your hero Nathan Notebook would’ve wanted!

For those who prefer fauna over flora, Boone Hall has a butterfly enclosure (the “Butterfly Pavilion” per the map) where folks can wander and goggle at all those bright, colorful wings.

We capped off our long walk with a stop for ice cream at the Butterfly Cafe. Anne was happy to confirm the gift shop clerk we’d met near Rainbow Row was right: we could indeed find cheaper postcards elsewhere than at her shop. Thanks, Butterfly Cafe!

…and that’s the story of the one time our lives ever intersected with The Notebook.

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!]