After our long, exhaustive walk of Boston’s Freedom Trail, we capped Day Three with a quieter, shadier stroll through the Boston Public Garden, across the street from Boston Common (under which we’d parked for the day). Both the Common and the Garden comprise one large idyllic hangout the size of several square blocks, smack in the heart of the city. It’s their version of Central Park, except smaller and less frequently seen in movies.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Day Three was set aside for our long walk of Boston’s Freedom Trail, a ground-level guideline to escort tourists past all the most noteworthy locations to bear significance from previous centuries. In some areas of town it’s a painted red line; in others, it’s a series of bricks built into the very sidewalks, as seen here at far left, next to one of many quaint cobblestone back roads not conducive to comfy driving, biking, or navigating via phone app.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we began Day 3 of our vacation by walking two miles or so along Boston’s Freedom Trail, which winds its way through its centuries-old heart and guides you near the most talked-about points of interest. The only trick is you have to remember to look up from your map so you can see and appreciate them instead of passing by them obliviously.
Wherever you find history, you’ll find statues. Tonight’s episode collects our views of the inanimate guardians who glared at us along the way, but thankfully didn’t come to life and try to scare us out of town. For example, you may recognize this famous thinker from such popular works as HBO’s John Adams, The Office, and the American $100 bill.
Day Three was our first full-length day in Boston. We arrived the night before and discovered for ourselves the convoluted, aggravating, illogical, asymmetrical, mind-bending labyrinth that is their street “design”. According to a legend I’m making up on the spot based on my exasperated experiences, the Puritans who first settled the area in 1630 chose where their roads should lead by donning blindfolds, spinning around fifty times, and trying to walk in straight lines while carrying overflowing buckets of paint. Wherever they splashed the paint, no matter what contorted shapes it made, even if paint lines crisscrossed, overlapped, swirled in arcs, ran up the side of buildings, dropped into sinkholes, or dead-ended in someone’s parking lot, thus was the gravel laid and the licensed cartographers called in to stamp the resulting wagon-sized entanglements with the Department of Transportation’s official Seal of Approval. When future generations suggested that perhaps some courtesy straightening or extensive rerouting might be in order, those generations were thrashed within an inch of their lives and asked to leave town for attempting to undermine sacred tradition and for daring to badmouth The Way Things Have Always Been.
Centuries later, some radical free thinker was appointed to head the Department of Art, Tourism, and Special Events for the Mayor’s Office and was struck by the realization that the city’s tourist trade might go bankrupt if their numerous historical attractions were impossible for tourists to find without using black magic. To that end, Boston’s Freedom Trail became the first time we’ve ever seen a major city create a permanent travel guide based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark red-line method. With some portions painted and some made of collinear bricks, the Freedom Trail street guide leads interested parties on a two-mile walking tour of a dozen-plus famous spots of considerable renown without playing a paid game of Follow the Leader with a local part-timer.
My wife and I share a goal of hopefully setting foot in each of the forty-eight contiguous United States before we die. We usually aim to visit one or two states each year, but we’ll sometimes digress briefly into other states along the way simply so we can cross them off our to-do list, even if it’s a few hours at a single attraction. It was in that spirit of completism that we broke up the Day Two marathon drive from Dubois, PA, to Boston with our first-ever foray into the state of Connecticut.
After much research and little debate, we nominated this guy as our excuse for a Connecticut stop.
The bulk of Day One was a repeat of our Days One from several previous vacations: barreling through the vast expanse of Ohio with minimal stops so we can reach the states beyond. The only Ohio stop that left an impression was lunch in Dublin at a chain called Jason’s Deli (which we don’t have back home). I liked their heated lunchmeat fare more than my family did, but their mostly teenage staff weren’t quite focused on service. When we needed a box for leftovers, I stood at the counter for a few minutes watching half a dozen employees crowded behind the same counter all chatting, teasing each other, fiddling with supplies, or otherwise too preoccupied to afford me the courtesy of a simple “May I help you?” till I lurched closer to the counter and raised my voice. We’ll be skipping Jason’s on future road trips, then.
Unlike that motley crew, Pennsylvania certainly seemed happy to welcome us, once we were free of Ohio’s clutches.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, as begun last April:
[This coming] weekend is the fourth annual Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (that “C2E2″ thing I won’t shut up about) at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, which my wife and I will be attending for our third time. As a tribute to this fascinating city, and an intro to C2E2 newcomers to provide ideas of what else Chicago has to offer while they’re in town, a few of this week’s posts will be dedicated to out experiences in the Windy City when we’re not gleefully clustered indoors with thousands of other comics and sci-fi fans.
As luck would have it, my wife and I will be heading northwest once again in two weeks for this year’s Wizard World Chicago. What began last spring as a short-term miniseries, and then became slightly irrelevant as the event passed, is suddenly relevant once more. Call it the circle of geek-convention life.
With some of our past Chicago experiences, we’ve taken a time-out away from the cons for local sightseeing as a husband/wife quality-time thing. Today’s feature presentation is that shiny attractor of affluent tourists, the Magnificent Mile, the long line of upscale clothing stores and skyscraper-shaped malls dotting both sides of Michigan Avenue northward from Wacker Avenue.
We’ve strolled the Mile a couple of times, but we never buy anything. Any MCC readers with impeccable fashion tastes have surely discerned from our past photos that our clothing budget is far more modest than our convention budget. We have our priorities.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Before we settled in at our hotel, we detoured for one exploratory stop in the famous li’l town of Punxsutawney, annual Party Central for the American celebration known as Groundhog Day. The town’s most famous resident is Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who supposedly determines America’s winter destiny by crawling out of a hole and letting the sight of his shadow, or lack thereof, foretell whether or not winter would end on schedule. The town is littered with artistic tributes to Mr. Phil himself. Walk twenty feet with your eyes closed and you’re liable to trip over one of Phil’s many simulacra.
I wasn’t kidding by much. In addition to the individual works, Punxsutawney also sports a collection called “Phantastic Phils” — over thirty different fiberglass groundhogs scattered all over town. Each Phil is between four and five feet tall, has its own title, and is painted by different local artists in assorted fashions or practical occupations. My wife captured a fraction of them on camera, as a sort of self-appointed scavenger hunt with a time limit.
Most indulgent on Phil’s part: “The Wizard of Weather”. In this scenario, Phil clearly dreams of controlling the weather so that his forecasts would never, ever be wrong again, even if he had to alter reality and fix the weather to match his predictions. This is a glimpse into our new way of life if Phil ever turned to the dark side.
The first half of Day One was spent rocketing across the wide expansive of big fat Ohio as quickly as possible so we could spend the evening in Pennsylvania. Before we settled in at our hotel, we detoured for one exploratory stop in the famous li’l town of Punxsutawney, annual Party Central for the American celebration known as Groundhog Day.
Each year our family embarks on an American road trip in a different direction. My wife and I snap photos of all things pretty and peculiar. I create a travelogue partly for fun and partly for my own future reference when my memory fails in my twilight years. Someone needs to remind future-me of the good ol’ days. It might as well be present-me.
This year’s journey was a nine-day trip from Indianapolis to Boston and back again, with a few stops in each direction. Regular MCC followers were previously privy to photo-a-day highlights while we were on the road. In a series of non-consecutive entries, I’ll be sharing a plethora of photos from each of our major stopovers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, and upstate New York. Our experience wasn’t always sweetness and smiles, but we did our best to capture the sights and souls of our immediate surroundings.
The links to the full series, including the nine on-the-go entries, will be collected on a new main page shortly, same as was done for our 2012 road trip. Anyone who missed a chapter, joins in progress, or Googles their way here a year from now will be more than welcome to hop aboard. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
[SPECIAL NOTE: The following entry was lightly remastered September 4, 2023, at the request of sculptor Mike Majors, whose works featured prominently in our visit to Springfield, OH.]
The last day of vacation is always the worst. Our trips are spent living several days outside the confines of the everyday rat race, determining our own itinerary, making up our meal schedule as we go, enjoying the activities of our choosing in faraway places where our normal responsibilities can’t follow us. Inevitably the time arrives for transitioning from the freedom of the open road to the confines of our ordinary lives and the cubicle jobs that fund these expeditions.
This merchandise display is the perfect illustration for my new sitcom idea, Pink Nightmare Family. Two sons and two daughters are forced to fend for themselves after they’re abandoned by their intolerant parents, who don’t understand why their kids insist on living every moment of their lives inside four matching pink bunny suits. They never notice the strange stares from everyone around them. To pay the bills, they open a novelty lamp shop. They never take the suits off, but they never smell disgusting because of TV magic. All the plots will be recycled from every other sitcom ever, but with bunny suits, which will hopefully become the Next Big Thing. I, for one, think the world is ready for a cross between Party of Five and Full House, plus bunny suits, minus Dave Coulier’s Bullwinkle impressions.
Some roadside attractions don’t look like attractions unless you arrive properly informed and prepared to conduct an exhaustive, block-by-block search for the attraction in question, sometimes navigating around unexpected special events, poor road signage, streets that change name every 2-3 blocks, unwelcome construction zones, major Mapquest malfunctions, or our own distracting misconceptions. The way of the road-trip warrior can be a daily obstacle course whose reward is valuable only if you think it’s valuable.
On Day One of our vacation we stopped briefly to view statues in Springfield, Ohio. Today we stopped to view statues in Springfield, Massachusetts. Together they make interesting bookends, particularly since one of today’s attractions was a sculpture of a book.
Weatherman have been threatening us the last few days with the slight possibility of our vacation enduring some rainfall. Until today nary a drop had affected our plans. Their hedged predictions at long last came true as the showers were unleashed upon us and several other lucky vacationers while we were out to sea. Once again we found ourselves the targets of God’s funny sense of timing.
We hail from one of seventeen states that has never had a Chinatown to call its own. When we visited Manhattan in 2011, we spent hours walking through their Chinatown and immersing ourselves in surroundings resembling absolutely nothing back home. When we assembled our Boston to-do list, we considered their Chinatown was an obvious must-see. I wouldn’t call myself a travel authority by any means, but I imagine every great Chinatown needs a giant-sized gate like theirs.
Today’s main event was a few miles’ worth of walking through the heart of downtown Boston. Part of our journey was structured according to the thoughtfully organized recommendations of The City of Boston. Part of it was freeform whim-based wandering. Once we were done having it both ways and had checked off the highest ranking items on our to-do list, we made a point of concluding the day’s tourism with a few minutes of natural tranquility.
On the outside, our Boston accommodations sport a unique architectural design. This 185-year-old brick roundhouse was originally a fuel depository, left an empty husk for decades until it was snatched up and overhauled by one of the major chains over a decade ago. The front doors are easy to miss, recessed into one wall with minimal ornamentation. If you ignore the signage, from a distance it resembles an odd factory or a super-villain’s designer warehouse.
On the inside, it’s as modern, elegant, and packed with extra flourishes as one would hope to find in a big-city hotel, though some big cities have disappointed us in that department. (Orlando, I’m looking in the direction of your refrigerator boxes cleverly disguised as “suites”.) Our room has more furniture and appliances than we expected, plus its own anteroom and plenty of space if we were the kind of weird family who exercised as a group. In terms of amenities and interior decoration, it’s easily in the top ten all-time overnight experiences.
Our surroundings tell a very different story, one that I’m not sure would entice the average vacationing suburbanite.
Before we left home, my wife and I were lamenting how we arrive at our locations each year with a knack for missing all the local celebrations and festivities. This year we’ll be arriving in Boston the week after Independence Day (which I’m sure Boston commemorates with revolutionary pizzazz) and three weeks before the Boston Comic Con. We’ve lost count of how many special events in years past that we missed in other cities by arriving one week late or leaving a day too early.
Imagine our surprise when we found a full-blown town carnival awaiting us when we arrived in the tiny, famous town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the latest bearer of the title Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most renowned and wildly inaccurate weather prognosticator.
All the essential supplies: maps, guidebooks, drinks, containers, summer reading, tunes, pens ‘n’ notebook.
(Ha! Little joke. I wish I could see my wife’s face right now as she reads this. Hopefully I’m still in bed and well out of striking distance.)
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 