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…

Our early road trips were all about nonstop tourist-attraction marathons, flitting from one city to the next and seeing how many Roadside America recommendations and top-ranking TripAdvisor highlights we could pushpin on our mental bulletin boards. As we’ve gotten older, we’ve found value in visiting a place and simply being there for a while. We’re not the sort of shoppers who go full-on Blair Warner in large malls or rows of stores and come away carrying so many shopping bags that their cheap twine handles leave friction burns on our wrists, but we do have our particular acquisition interests.

In that spirit we set aside one day of our seven-day vacation solely for walking through the heart of downtown Charleston in general and the pulsating artery that is King Street. In a 21st-century America where small towns and mid-sized cities count themselves blessed if their functional downtown businesses outnumber their abandoned storefronts, there was a certain surprise throughout the first mile of our walk as the stores — a mix of upscale boutiques, mom-‘n’-pop shops, and cultural nodes — just kept going and going and going.

DAY FOUR: TUESDAY, June 27th.

We took the now-familiar Savannah Highway toward downtown, parked near a visitor center that used to be a train station called Camden Depot, and paused our sightseeing in favor of heading directly to breakfast. After hemming and hawing over whether or not we’d be moving the car later and whether or not to take bottled waters along for our initial walk, we opted to minimize our weight and left them behind. This stupid choice led to suffering later.

We found repast at Glazed Gourmet Doughnuts, a local staple for over a dozen years at the time of our visit.

Clockwise from top left: sea salt butterscotch, vanilla bean glazed, sweet corn blueberry, and their “Black & White” powdered donut filled with Belgian dark chocolate. The sea salt butterscotch was our mutual favorite. If any employees noticed me accidentally cough and blow powdered sugar all over myself, they were kind enough not to point and laugh. We sat in for a few, relaxed to local radio overhead, and applauded the heroism of the young clerk who realized a customer had left their credit card behind, ran out the door after her, and succeeded in reuniting them a fair distance down the street.

(One of the drawbacks of waiting so long to write these travelogues is my little game of “Whatever Happened To…?” — in which I curiously peek at how the places we’ve been are doing in the present — sometimes takes me to sorrowful revelations. We were unaware their founder/owner had died in a car accident three months prior to our visit. I was equally unaware till this very day of writing that Glazed closed their doors for good in April 2024, citing the loss of her as a major contributing factor in the decision. “This sucks” is a severe understatement, but we hope those folks have persevered through their next chapters.)

Once fed, then we returned to the vicinity of the visitor center and poked around a bit.

The farther south we walked, the independent businesses seemed to give way to trendier, higher-end nationwide chains. In Indianapolis terms, it was a bit like walking from Broad Ripple directly into Keystone Fashion Mall. Upon reaching Market Street we turned east and kept going, leaving the car and our water bottles farther behind.

Charleston City Market was four blocks long, a bustling corridor of a bazaar populated with vendors of various arts, crafts, foods, and Christmas stuff. Wandering about without a booth of his own was a Gullah peddler selling “palmetto roses” (read: fronds folded into quasi-origami flowers). Ever cheery about sliding into the “ordinary tourist” role, Anne bought one despite City Market signs explicitly asking patrons not to. To this day Anne remains a fugitive from Charleston market law.

Despite a thorough search of the premises, Anne couldn’t find the sort of souvenirs Anne wanted. We doubled back and looked around the other nearby storefronts and found one she’d targeted in her own notes: a seemingly leprechaun-themed boutique called Sheila’s Shamrock.

Anne’s primary objective was their smashed penny machine out front. Longtime MCC readers know smashed pennies are her favorite kind of travel souvenir. She has books and books collecting the li’l flattened coins, which might go the way of the dodo once the American penny is phased out forever.

Alas, another game of “Whatever Happened To…?” ends with a sad trombone: internet sources report Sheila’s Shamrock went out of business in or before February 2025. Local Yelp user Kim M. reports: “While this was a local business operating for over 35 years it was forced to close due to outside operators coming in and cutting prices to force locals out of business. Sad to see.” That sucks.

Other businesses we passed but didn’t photograph included a boutique called Gallery 42, whose hostess foisted a free bar of soap on Anne but didn’t quite entice us to buy anything. After being a tad let down by the T-shirt offerings at Sheila’s Shamrock, Anne was much happier when we reached the French Quarter and found more suitably Charleston-forward options at another gift shop called Palmettoville, which proudly leaned into those ubiquitous flora, which I will never stop pointing out because we don’t have them here in Indy. To us palmettos are officially capital-E Exotic, whereas I chuckle at any out-of-towners who thinks maple trees are mind-blowing. We have maples on our property. I’d mail you one of them if I could — the sicklier one that clogs my gutters every autumn.

As it happens, Palmettoville was also on her list of area businesses harboring smashed penny machines.

Upon our arrival, a nuclear family of five who looked like they’d just stepped out of an impeccable JCPenney Portrait Studio summertime shoot were struggling to figure out the penny-smashing process, what with the coin slots and the gears and the giant crank and all. Ever the expert, Anne stepped up, showed them how it’s done, supervised while they created their own souvenirs, and probably saved their entire vacation from utter disaster.

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!]