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…

Whenever other people travel to South Carolina — especially the hotspots of, say, Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach — they enjoy lounging in the chairs they brought along, chugging all the alcohol in sight, flirting with anyone and everyone in sight who’s doing the same, and/or frolicking willy-nilly while shouting, “BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH!” The two of us figured out years ago we aren’t beach people.

Sure, we’ve walked around a few, just so we could say we’d tried them. In 2007, my very first time ever laying eyes upon a real live ocean, a severe thunderstorm chased us off Cocoa Beach. The following year, we approached Virginia Beach on a perfect summer day. We came, we saw, we wandered, we made feeble sculptures, and we wondered, “Is that it?” In 2015 we learned at Mississippi’s Harrison County Sand Beach that it’s pretty fun to have a beach all to yourself for goofing around at 8 in the morning, but it still wasn’t somewhere we wanted to linger, burn, and watch skin cancers manifest in real time.

By our final South Carolina morning we’d hit all the primary objectives on our vacation to-do list and figured, hey, the Atlantic Ocean was still right there. It’s famous and massive and it’s not like we’ve seen all of it yet, so maybe one walk on a beach couldn’t hurt and might not even bore us. Our tour of Fort Sumter had thrown in a few sandbars for free, but that wasn’t a certified beach-beach, with umbrellas and volleyball and concession stands and lifeguards and one-percenter hotels obscuring half the horizons around us. For our last hurrah in the Charleston vicinity, Anne picked us a beach from among the numerous options that we could check out before we had to leave town and begin the long trip back northwest toward duller, smoggier climes.

After breakfast we headed out to Isle of Palms Beach, which you don’t really notice is on an island unless you stare at all the adjacent waterways really hard when you’re driving and do the geographic math in your head…or, I guess, pay closer attention while you were mapping your trip. No one told us there’d been a mass shooting at the beach not even three months prior to our visit, but I don’t know that we desperately needed to know that anyway.

Much happier random sights on the way to and from the beach:

We were surprised to find dozens of folks already set up and soaking in the rays. Kids sauntered around, a couple of whom swore they totally saw a dolphin. A lone metal-detector wielder had all the loose change and pirate treasures to himself. We found no gift shops or any real commerce on or along the beach itself, as the whole place is officially just a county park. We did note structures to that effect down the street, but we’d already met our souvenir quotas anyway.

After we’d had our fill of beach, we braked for one last sight before departing. We wandered over to nearby Sullivan Island, a residential area whose distinguishing features include still more palmettos and yard signs protesting the presence of timeshares in their neighborhood, venting concerns about their pricey community being downgraded by rotating tourists. Many a traveler before us have noted one particular house bears a striking resemblance to Luke Skywalker’s childhood home on Tatooine, arguably too close for coincidence. Photos of it are plentiful online, but it’s private property and not open to visitors. Online records indicate it last sold years ago for $4 million, but it’s worth nearly twice that in today’s economy.

It took us a few tries to spot it, obscured by several trees as well as a giant utility or delivery truck in the driveway. We didn’t want to park and disturb all those homeowning yard-sign protestors, so we did the best we could without stopping.

Meanwhile back home in Indiana, the skies above our state were wrecked. Fun ironic trivia: on this very day in history and some of the days before and after it, Canadian wildfires had run rampant and caused so much destruction that unprecedented waves of smoke crossed the border, plowed through Michigan and turned our Hoosier skies to nigh unbreathable, apocalyptic ruins. Smog is not a common Midwest sight (I did see some once above Louisville back in the ’80s), but its noxious presence was all the rage on our Facebook feeds, to the regret of family and friends who weren’t out of town.

So it looks like we picked the right day to hit the beach.

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!]