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…

Historical sites and summertime scenery notwithstanding, one of my favorite parts of the Charleston experience was the food. We’d made sure to budget accordingly in case of impeccable restaurants. Our first full day in town was a feast of delights.

First thing before the Fort Sumter tour, we started the morning at Toast!, which earns bonus points for exclamation. A local chain with six locations (plus a seventh outpost in distant Savannah, GA), I was drawn to Toast!’s seafood-based breakfast options, but disappointed that they were out of crab when I tried ordering crab cakes. They did, on the other hand, have enough materials to handle a blue-crab-and-shrimp omelet. Fine by me — their game, their crab allocations. Our server was a nice guy, but only on his third day and still learning where all the buttons were on his order-taking tablet.

I settled into my chair half-asleep and listened to the overhead radio, a typical mix of country and lite-pop. One surprise: the full version of Maroon 5’s “Beautiful Mistakes” including the rap break by Megan Thee Stallion. I’m not an Adam Levine fan, but I recognized it from our local lite-pop station overplaying it many a morning…except their heavy-rotation version deletes her part, so I never knew it existed till this very moment. That particular station has always been really bad about falling back on whites-only edited versions of modern hits to mix in with their oldies. Advantage: Charleston.

In the background you can just barely make out Anne’s comfort breakfast of brioche French toast and a side of bacon.

For lunch we did an extremely rare thing: we tried a restaurant suggested by our hotel’s staff. At their word we got reservations at Fleet Landing, not far down the harbor from our ferry launch point. The parking fee at the next-door lot was half-price if we’d planned to eat there — no proof of reservation required, honor system in full effect and the chap on duty said we could keep the car there all day if we’d like. Bonus points for the Southern hospitality.

After Sumter and our walk up and down Riverfront Park, we arrived ten minutes early for our reservation, but were escorted to a table right away despite the long line outside. We were seated near an open doorway that let in a nonstop breeze off the nearby waters. The place was hopping; the crowd ambiance drowned out whatever Muzak was playing.

That’s my lunch in our lead photo. Anne went with a “simple” soup-and-salad combo featuring she-crab soup, a rich South Carolina delicacy we’d never heard of before this trip. It involves crab, roe, and extreme creaminess.

Not pictured was her baby spinach salad topped with grilled shiitake mushrooms, applewood bacon, grape tomatoes, goat cheese, red onion and carrot curls in a balsamic vinaigrette. My favorite part may have been the appetizer — the hotel managers’ eyes had practically glowed while recommending their seafood-stuffed hush puppies.

Late afternoon, we were dead on our feet by the time we finished lollygagging around the lovely gardens of Boone Hall Plantation. We collapsed at the hotel for a couple hours, which allowed Anne to pack in two more episodes of Waco: The Aftermath, which she was determined to finish on vacation while we still had access to free Showtime.

Farther down Savannah Highway in the opposite direction from Toast!, dinner was at The Glass Onion, with a self-described focus on “original Southern home-grown, locally focused, all natural” fare. Their co-owner/Executive Chef is a Birmingham native who trained in various locales over the years before relocating post-Katrina to the South Carolina Lowcountry, where The Glass Onion’s been since 2007. So no, they’re totally unrelated and predate the most excellent Rian Johnson movie by a good span, but they earn Great Minds Think Alike bonus points anyway.

We had no reservations this time and waited a harmless ten minutes for a table. The wait for our server and his full concentration took a bit longer. The intervals between his visits may have been due to the high-level TLC devoted to cooking our excellent meals, or they may have been exacerbated by his personal lament about reentering the dating game after the recent end of a long-term relationship. We sympathized with his loss and busied ourselves during his micro-sabbaticals with the tools furnished to every table: brown-bag paper and crayons!

I took one small section and began scribbling our tourism options for Tuesday. Anne responded by transcribing one of the McDonald’s jingles of yesteryear.

Then things escalated.

As the crayon points dulled and annoyed me, I switched to my own pen and picked up considerable speed, for all the good it did me.

Understand, we did all this from memory, not while staring at our phones for reference. I was not kidding: we were given a lot of free time here.

Nevertheless, dinner arrived and impressed.

(Yes, everyone’s generous with the shredded cheese ’round these parts.)

Afterward we made time for one last, quick roadside attraction half a mile away from The Glass Onion: a visit to the Coburg Cow, likewise on Savannah Highway. Since 1959 she’s stood tall in the West Ashley neighborhood, where she used to be the mascot of a dairy farm/supplier that left her in place even after they moved away and eventually got bought out by Borden. Her position is manually changed on occasion as a sort of makeshift weather vane and/or symbolic meteorologist. I imagine it was a huge deal when she was temporarily taken down in ’89 and sheltered from the onslaught of Hurricane Hugo.

…and then we called it a night, whereupon Anne finished Waco: The Aftermath. Because it’s good to meet your goals on vacation.

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!]