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…

Somehow the two-day drive to Charleston felt less like a slog and more like a leisurely jaunt. I suppose it helped that we didn’t brake for as many roadside digressions as usual. After our stopover in Columbia, we enjoyed one quick sight — a modest tribute to a galaxy far, far away — before proceeding to our ultimate destination slightly farther away but not that far away.

Southwest of Columbia was the city of Cayce, more or less conveniently on the way back to I-26. As longtime MCC readers might imagine, our ears perked up when we heard their artistic highlights included a nod to Star Wars: a wire-frame sculpture of an AT-AT, those elephantine stomping machines introduced in The Empire Strikes Back. The 2015 creation of local artist and retired Special Forces soldier John Sharpe stood sixteen feet tall in the yard of a former pottery shop that he converted into a microdistillery. It was displayed at least once at Soda City Comic Con some time prior and meant as the harbinger of further arts developments to come.

Sadly the AT-AT was dismantled sometime between our June 2023 visit and a December 2023 Roadside America report. Since that time the Sharpe family has abandoned their Cayce plans and relocated farther south to Swansea. They’ve reopened a coffee shop there and presumably have other art-minded plans in store.

The AT-AT’s untended, verdant defense perimeter haunted us as we spent the next several miles in the car swatting armies of bugs off our legs. It could’ve been worse for us — over the next 100+ miles our traffic flow stalled because of two different accidents several miles apart, each one involving SUVs that had run off the road and into the trees. The first one had had to drive a good 100 feet or so uphill before impact.

Much as we’d love to be the sort of upper-class travelers who can afford beachfront stays on every vacation, our next three nights’ accommodations were in Charleston’s West Ashley area — a mix of the residential and the commercial some miles away from the Atlantic Ocean, but it included a plethora of restaurant options within a few miles’ radius. Famous former residents of West Ashley in their youths included Stephen Colbert and Darius Rucker.

Our room was twice the size of the one in Knoxville. The staff was extremely friendly, which isn’t always something I remember to write down in my notes, so I presume in foggy hindsight I must’ve been really impressed. They recommended a particular harborside restaurant that we took them up on the next day with zero regrets.

As for this evening, dinner was at Boxcar Betty’s, a local purveyor of fried chicken sandwiches since 2014. We visited their flagship store down the road, but they’ve expanded to five locations as of this writing — two others in the Charleston vicinity; one in Charlotte, NC; and one in Chicago’s West Loop.

Not pictured: in lieu of chicken, the base of Anne’s sandwich was a patty-sized pimiento-stuffed portobello mushroom. We found pimiento was kind of a big deal ’round those parts. Not until days later did we also realize this ended up being the only fried chicken we had of any kind in South Carolina all week long, with or without bread, despite being firmly in The South. Maybe it was wrong to assume our Georgia experiences and expectations were transferable.

Our hotel TV had the exact same lineup of streaming apps as the previous one had. While I jotted notes for the day and sorted the stack of Carolina literature that had been foisted upon me at the last rest stop, Anne continued her Showtime binge of Waco: The Aftermath, which was technically also Of The South but set in another state and frame of mind far, far away.

To be continued!

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