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…

By noon our long walk through downtown Charleston had taken us over a mile south of our car and into their version of the French Quarter — a mite smaller than New Orleans’ own that we’d visited a decade earlier, and nearly as sweltering, but 100% fewer drunkards bumping into us. We tried to focus on the sights all around despite having emptied our water bottles.

We planned for lunch at 82 Queen, which is the name and address of an elegant Lowcountry restaurant that’s been serving refined seafood specialties since 1982. They had no wait for tables (unlike a competitor on the same block that had a line out the door, leaving customers to boil away on the pavement) and didn’t rebuke us for our informal tourist togs or our layers of perspiration.

We both had bowls of their she-crab soup as our appetizers, but the main dishes were delightful in their own ways. The staff never made us feel less than welcome. At the end of our meal, the waitress took pity and graciously offered to refill my empty water bottle for me, upon seeing me struggle to pour my own using the water pitcher on our table with all the dignity of a grandma stuffing fast-food ketchup packets in her purse.

After lunch we began shopping our way back to King Street and the car, in that order. Now that it was later in the day and more shops were open, we had more options for getting out of the sun and take some refreshing A/C breaks along the way.

(I bought Werner Herzog’s short novel The Twilight World. I never knew he wrote books, and I still can’t believe he joined Instagram this year.)

We rested yet again outside the Hut while a young busker with multiple instruments and a few prerecorded accompaniments regaled the clientele with some covers. I’m unsure if the all-ages crowd fully appreciated “Blister in the Sun” beyond a superficial “he’s right, it IS hot” level. Others might’ve enjoyed when he switched to bass for “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”.

(I picked up Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation, which I later read and reviewed. The aforementioned Herzog book is in my desk at work as of this very day, next in reading order.)

(CDs acquired: R.E.M.’s Accelerate, because I’d only recently discovered it was far superior to their last three sleepwalking efforts; a 2003 15th-anniversary re-release of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Mother’s Milk to replace my worn-out cassette; and a rather dodgy Pink greatest-hits compilation that’s light on liner notes and misspells one song title.)

And we bought still more sugar along the way. Call it a survival mechanism, in that pleasure also helps make survival worthwhile.

Bubbie’s was another nice place to chill out and hide from lethal UV rays. To an extent we found throughout our day that a lot of local clerks and vendors will reflexively gab with tourists about How Hot It Is when prompted, possibly because it’s the number one topic on the mind of any out-of-towner on days like this. Somehow at Bubbie’s we digressed into chitchat about tornadoes, even though offhand I don’t recall us bringing up Indiana. Maybe we did and they just wanted us to feel more at home?

To be continued!

* * * * *

[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!]