This is how everyone spends their tenth wedding anniversary, right? Because my wife and I sure wouldn’t want to look out of place or anything.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 8: the Rock in the House
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 3: Monday, July 24th (continued)
Eventually, after the dashboard downshifted from Red Alert, and after one missed turnoff along the Minnesota side of the Mississippi River, we skipped back into Wisconsin and reached Highway 35, a.k.a. the Great River Byway, a stretch of road that follows along the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi through several small towns all the way to Minnesota. We were unaware until we reached it that the byway was an attraction unto itself, but it was a beautiful surprise. The river on your left is gorgeous, but the ridges and rock formations on your right are intimidating yet impressive.
Yes, this photo again. But hours away from the Dells, we eventually remembered that we like nature.
Our first intentional stop on the Byway was in Fountain City, home of a roadside attraction called the Rock in the House. From the front, it’s just another home near a cliffside. As you approach from the modest parking area, it appears ordinary, even quaint.
Just a house….or IS IT?
From the rear, it looks like this:
You’re not helping, boy.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 7: Last Hurrah in Wisconsin Dells
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 3: Monday, July 24th
The morning was spent alternating between packing, indulging in the hotel breakfast buffet — nothing special, but less stale and more choices than what we’d had in Milwaukee — and admiring the hotel’s cable selection, which offered unusual channels that we can’t get here at home like MTV2 and G4. We watched an entire (rerun) episode of Cheat! just because my son and I were fascinated by the idea of a TV show devoted to video game tips and cheat codes, even if the episode featured games we’re unlikely to play anytime soon (among them Batman Begins and God of War).
We checked out and drove straight to Riverview Park & Waterworld, arriving just as they opened the doors at 10 a.m. We originally wanted to be on the road to Minnesota much, much sooner, but the free passes were an unexpected boon. Given how much money we blew the previous days for so much underwhelming enjoyment in return, we were bound and determined to get our money’s worth out of Wisconsin Dells in general, in some bizarre karmic way, even though we don’t believe in capital-K Karma.
I was kinda pooled-out after the previous day’s festivities both at Mt. Olympus and the hotel pool. Since Anne hadn’t had a shot at water rides yet, she and the boy suited up and rode every single water ride on the premises while I played the role of our official bagman.
Water slide races! One of several aqueous pleasures that looked nifty from a distance, if you were in the mood and not BITTER about certain other things that were no fault of this particular water park’s.
Right this way as we bid farewell to this town-sized tourist trap…
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 6: The Worst Pirate-Themed Anything of All Time
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 2: Sunday, July 23rd (continued)
After a long, hard day of amusement and soaking came another long-preplanned stop, dinner at a restaurant named Crabby’s Seafood Buffet. Not just all-you-can-eat seafood: every ad we saw from the Internet to brochures to local posters pictured a pair of clean-cut geeks pretending to be surly pirates in satin, posing beneath a caption vowing “Free Pirate Battle!” This promise was in every single ad we saw, more of a mantra than a motto. To us, this sounded like Medieval Times with a different angle and more food. We expected to improvise our meals on the run all vacation long, but Crabby’s was the only restaurant specified on our itinerary because it just sounded that promising. They even give each patron their own paper pirate hat to wear all through the meal. As with the Jelly Belly Factory, my son protested his hat and refused to don it.
We, on the other hand…
Beyond these doors were sights that would’ve made Spongebob Squarepants shred himself with fury.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 5: Scaling Down Mount Olympus
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 2: Sunday, July 23rd (continued)
Our next stop after Alligator Alley had been preplanned months in advance. Our only previous water-park encounter was the single time we remembered to bring swimsuits to Kings Island, but didn’t gidet around to putting them on till two hours before closing time. We’d enjoyed what little we could in such a short timespan, but we yearned to enjoy a water park without hurrying. Besides, we’d have to be complete fuddy-duddies not to visit the self-styled Water Park Capital of the World and not visit at least one lousy water park. Our choice was an ancient Greco-Roman theme park called Mt. Olympus. For my son, it seemed a winning combination. He likes pools. He likes amusement parks. He likes Greek mythology. (He and I were among the half-dozen people in America who got a kick out of Disney’s Hercules.) All three combined should’ve been a winning ticket.
Enter, and be one with the gods! Or just pay godlike prices.
You half-expect Hercules to be hanging around and preparing to topple some of these. Or Samson, even.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 4: Appointment in Alligator Alley
Albino alligator! As not seen in the movie of the same name.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 2: Sunday, July 23rd
Every hotel on this vacation also included free breakfast. This hotel would prove to offer the weakest of the week, mostly muffins and stale cake donuts. Maybe pilots thrive on those, but we didn’t.
The drive out of Milwaukee brought us further into bona fide Wisconsin heartland, swathed in foliage and crops greener than ours back in Indiana, dotted with businesses sporting names like “Mousehouse Cheesehaus”, and permeated with the sounds of the John Tesh Radio Show, which alternated the usual hoary old EZ-listening standards with self-help bon mots from the Teshmeister himself. Within hours we left Tesh behind and arrived at our next city of choice, Wisconsin Dells.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 3: Milwaukee for Art’s Sake
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 1: Saturday, July 22nd (continued)
Fairly rejuvenated, we headed north from Pleasant Prairie along Lake Michigan to our next stop, the Milwaukee Art Museum. This stop was literally a last-minute addition to the itinerary. We’d decided months prior which nights would be spent in which cities. Night one would be in Milwaukee, only four hours away. Since we knew the Jelly Belly tour wouldn’t last all day, and since Milwaukee is less than five hours from Indianapolis in good traffic, we knew we had time to kill. Only problem was, we couldn’t find anything up our alley in Milwaukee for the longest time. Other than the same combination found in every major city of zoo, museum, kids’ museum, art museum, and historic sites involving personalities barely known to outsiders, the only tourist attractions of note seemed to be alcohol-based. None of us are drinkers, socially or otherwise, so their appeal to us was minimal.
On that Thursday, a mere thirty hours before we left Indianapolis, I Googled the name of a local advertising museum to clarify something before I added it to the reject pile. Google led me to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s home page, where I stopped short.
Hey, movie fans! Recognize this?
You won’t believe what this comics fan discovered the night before leaving town!…
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 2: This is Our Hill and These Are Our Beans
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Day 1: Saturday, July 22nd
We packed quickly, then hit the open road after a quick stop to air up the tires — all four of which were low — and shut off that dashboard light at last. The first few hours from Indianapolis to Chicago were mostly uneventful, unless you count my hairbreadth near-miss of an interstate exit sign I’d been seeking in Chicago. To steer clear of the wrong turnoff and avoid the line of cars steamrolling past us in the proper lane, I had to drive up onto the raised median between the forks in the road. I could blame the rampant Chicago interstate construction, or I could blame my proclivity for occasional concentrated daydreaming at inopportune moments. Or I could take the easy, responsibility-free way out and blame society. Either way, no way could I have pulled that move in my own car, a ’96 Cavalier, without sailing right off both axles. For once, the day was saved, thanks to…the SUV!
Once we were well past the heavy reconstruction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, we stopped briefly in Lake Forest for gas, then motored out of Illinois, into Wisconsin, and on to the pretty, pretty town of Pleasant Prairie, where the local botanists worked overtime to make a good first impression on travelers. A few miles east of the exit was our first tourist attraction of the trip, the Jelly Belly Factory, proud makers of jellybeans and jellybean accessories.
I hear this car’s engine ran on jellybeans instead of gas, but then GM bought it and dropped it into the Mariana Trench.
Our 2006 Road Trip, Part 1: Our Milkman’s Chariot Awaits
[Welcome to the first installment of a very special miniseries, representing the original travelogue from our family’s 2006 vacation to scenic Wisconsin and Minnesota, home of much forestry, many lakes, and very odd things. Some hindsight editing and modern-day commentary will be included along the way as value-added bonus features for readers old and new alike.
All photos were taken with one of two cameras: one Kodak EasyShare that was obsolete when we bought it, and one 35mm camera whose film had to be dropped off for developing and whose pics were scanned using an equally obsolete, poor-res scanner. Very little about these entries will approach 1080p quality. Back in our day, this is what history looked like. When these travelogues were written, they were as much about the writing as they were about the pics. Consequently, some entries will have one photo, while others will have several.
I’m adding some present-day commentary in spots as value-added epilogues. I’ll also be inserting several photos that we’ve never shared publicly before. Even our internet friends who read the original entries will be seeing previously unreleased material for the first time.
Enjoy!]
Day 0: Friday, July 21st
As with last year’s vacation, rather than submit either of our own cars to hundreds of miles of wear and tear, we rented an SUV for the extra space, comfort, and intimidation factor — what better way to announce to the townsfolk of other locales, “Back off, man! We’re TOURISTS!” Granted, we had to prepare ourselves to spend extra money on gas, but that falls in line with my own little personal plan to help save America: the way I figure it, if every one of us works together to use up all the gas in the world as quickly as possible, down to the very last drop, then we’ll be forced to make the transition to alternative fuel sources that much sooner.
MCC No-Reason Live-Tweeting: “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”
How much of this mid-transformation shot is CG and how much is the real Nicolas Cage? I’m not asking him. YOU ask him.
While my son is off living at college and my wife finds other things to amuse herself, my Wednesday nights have become one-man movie nights at home. I work an earlier shift that day, arrive home mid-afternoon, and watch stuff and things for a while. It’s a pleasure I’ve rarely afforded myself, as evidenced by the towering pile of unwatched DVDs and my slowly lengthening Netflix queue.
On Twitter I’ve not been one for constant live-tweeting, but a few months ago I spent one Wednesday live-tweeting my viewing displeasure of Batman and Robin at a friend’s suggestion. This past Wednesday I repeated the experience at absolutely no one’s suggestion with a fifty-cent Blu-ray rental of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, starring Idris Elba, Ciaran Hinds, exactly one female, and Academy Award Winner Nicolas Cage as the notorious Marvel antihero. Collected below for posterity or whatever are the results of that experience.
“Snowpiercer”: No Saints After the Apocalypse
“Marvel Team-Up” presents Captain America and the War Doctor in Snowpiercer.
Sure, a bleak Korean sci-fi film based on a French graphic novel, delayed for months while studio heads squabbled over whether or not to delete nearly 20% of it before letting Americans see it, doesn’t sound like the perfect star vehicle for Chris Evans, cinematic hero of this summer’s Captain America: the Winter Soldier. It’s certainly not a vote of confidence that the Weinstein Company compromised by leaving it intact but downgraded to a limited-release run with minimal advertising. In the hands of an unkinder corporation, Snowpiercer could’ve found itself sentenced with immediate relegation to the Walmart $5 DVD bin.
Thanks to exactly one theater in all of Indianapolis, last weekend I had the chance to witness one of the darkest, riskiest, most thought-provoking spectacles of the year. Considering the competition is mostly sequels, I’ll admit that’s not saying much.
Real Maps Are Like Big Crispy Paper Blankets
Remember the ancient times of the mid-to-late twentieth century, when long trips to unfamiliar places couldn’t be navigated by squinting at a computer the size of a deck of cards? If you needed to get from point A to point B, your first hope was that an elderly relative could give you directions that used no street names and depended on visual landmarks such as specific gas stations or funny-shaped trees. Plan B was to wander in the general direction until your wife got mad enough to make you stop the car and ask the locals for pointers. Plan C was to stay home and find something else to do.
Plan D was maps. Giant-sized maps that didn’t fit in your pocket unless you wadded them into a ball first, or wore overalls with enormous pockets. They unfolded into thirty or forty sections and covered your entire dining room table. If you were improvising on the run, they covered your dashboard, steering wheel, and most of your line of sight. Driving while mapping was, much like driving while texting, a fun way to terrorize your passengers and the drivers in the other lanes, adding new levels of stuntman risk to even the calmest Sunday outing.
“The Internet’s Own Boy”: For Want of Information, a Light Was Lost
If RSS feeds, Creative Commons, Reddit, Tor, or Wikipedia are part of your everyday internet life, or if you cheered when SOPA was put to sleep, you can thank Aaron Swartz for helping make those possible. The deeply affecting new documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: the Story of Aaron Swartz retraces the path of one young man whose lifelong passion for freedom of Information — not pirating HBO shows or sharing porn, but for useful, scholarly, scientific, potentially world-changing, capital-I Information — took him through countless revolutionary contributions, creations, and crusades until his sudden, unforeseen, tragic end.
“Transformers: Age of Extinction”: Public Enemy #1?
An inventive man of action, a young woman he’s sworn to protect, an amazing traveling machine, lots and lots of running, and they keep reusing the same old robot villains. So it’s like an American remake of Doctor Who.
So. Transformers: Age of Extinction, then. Last weekend the internet gave Michael Bay’s new endurance test an F-minus-minus-minus. I’m not sure if they sat through it or assumed as much based on the available evidence and testimonies. I have no idea how many critics were fans of the cartoons or other related products. I owned several toys and bought the first year’s worth of the original Marvel Comics series, but lost interest in both around age 14 and forfeited knowledge of any subsequent characters or continuity. I thought the first film was the Greatest Michael Bay Film of All Time For What That’s Worth, the second one was the complete opposite of art, and the third was somewhere in between, improved by use of real-life Chicago as a setting for the last four hours of its running time.
If it hadn’t been for the sake of father/son quality time while he’s home visiting for the weekend, I might not have seen Age of Extinction. But here he was, here the weekend was, and there the movie was.
Unironic Wishes for a Happy July 4th
Art by Joe Giella.
You don’t? Cool. Neither do I. But when America’s Independence Day rolls around, any number of internet hangouts feel much like that every year. I’m not really in the mood for it just now.
I was trying to come up with some balance of “America” and “sincerity” to mark the occasion here on MCC, and the first icon to leap to mind was Captain America, because that’s how my mind rolls. I could’ve spent hours digging through my collection and scanning pages from the greatest Cap stories I’ve ever read. Instead I’ve consciously opted for a mix of quaint simplicity, practical wisdom, and childhood nostalgia that brought a smile to my face when I revisited it for the first time in years.
The clickable image shown above is page 122 from the 1976 self-help classic The Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book, in which some of Marvel’s greatest heroes teach readers a series of exercises to improve their health, tone their physique, get their blood pumping, dispel their couch-potato image, and give them an edge in crime-fighting. The book isn’t exactly one of the classics from the Marvel library, but its advice and demonstrations are useful and encouraging to anyone seeking that sort of thing.
Among the participating big names are Captain America and the Falcon, along with the Falcon’s li’l sidekick Redwing. Modern readers may find this all dated and a wee silly, but consider what’s demonstrated in the space of that single page besides the exercise itself: teamwork; perseverance; trust; inter-demographic cooperation; focused dedication toward a shared goal; and complete disregard for whether or not anyone else thinks they look foolish. So many great features from the factory showroom model of Classic America.
The short version: they’ve got each other’s backs no matter what. It’s wildly off-topic, sure. It’s no one’s idea of an overt “Happy Fourth of July!” greeting card, but it exemplifies much of what I’d love to see in one. Your move, Hallmark.
Happy 4th. Stay safe. Go find something in your country to enjoy. Maybe stow the partisan rhetoric and played-out “‘Murica!” jokes till at least the 5th, what say?
“Sleepy Hollow” Hiatus News Roundup and Season 1 Recap Guide
Tom Mison! Nicole Beharie! America’s new favorite buddy cops!
Less than three months until the season premiere of Sleepy Hollow! It’s been six months since the season 1 finale, but news and notices are popping up more and more as our heroes Lieutenant Abbie Mills and Professor Ichabod Crane prepare to return to active duty against the forces of the Headless Horseman, the demon called Moloch, the undead John Cho, and the mastermind behind them all, whose identity I should maybe not spoil for the sake of anyone planning to catch up on the series over the summer.
Today’s major news: Sleepy Hollow is coming to comics in October! Major indie company BOOM! Studios — whose current publishing lineup includes Adventure Time, Regular Show, Bravest Warriors, Robocop, Big Trouble in Little China, and the quirky creator-owned hit Lumberjanes — has secured the license to bring Crane, the Mills sisters, the Irving family, limbo-bound Katrina Crane, and the late Sheriff Corbin’s fatherly flashbacks to my favorite medium. (Sorry, movies. Missed it by that much.) The creative team of Marguerite Bennett and Jorge Coelho will have four issues to tell new stories that take place between various season-1 episodes, maybe filling in some gaps and finding ways to go all-out gonzo in print without having to worry about a strict TV budget.
The Days Are Saved, Thanks to Scrapbooking!
Short entry because I’ve spent much of the night immersed in one of these:
For preserving our family’s experiences, I have my writing and my wife has her scrapbooks. When my memories falter, her photo spreads help jump-start the recovery process for those old, lost anecdotes. She’s been assembling these for years and years, building up quite the family library. Vacations, conventions, special one-time outings, random notable occasions, family holidays — if we did something besides work, sleep, eat, or stare at screens, she’s scrapbooked it.
I’ve delved into this one tonight to retrieve several old 35mm photos from our 2006 vacation for future use. A few were previously scanned, but not all of them. It’s so weird looking back at my son, tall for an 11-year-old yet far from his adult height; my wife, timeless as always; and me, the year after my diet. And many of the shots with her 35mm camera looked better than the results from the frustrating digital camera I had at the time. Quite unfair. So I’ve been scanning and scanning and scanning and scanning the night away and I’m really, really tired of staring at the scanner and waiting for the platen elves to hurry and make with the magical uploading.
Sometimes we’ll share her scrapbooks with friends, walk them through with tag-team narration. For the most part, they’re for our own future use, especially for revisiting in those golden years (so to speak) when individual tales begin to blur, vital details vanish, names become scrambled, and punchlines lose their impact. If either of us are stricken with one of the worst-case-scenario kinds of conditions, the ones that pulverize mental faculties and effectively sever any connections to prized talents and qualities, I want these scrapbooks right beside us as our reminders, as our life-savers, as our virtual tour guides to ourselves, imbued with all that we were and all that we meant.
The above pictures-in-picture are from a small-town Wizard of Oz festival we attended in 2006, a cavalcade of Oz cosplay, surviving Munchkin actors, arts-‘n’-crafts booths, and general whimsy. One day we ought to share that story, but I kept it in reserve for a few reasons, none of them personal. When the time is right and the story yearns to be told, either to ourselves or to others, the scrapbook will be waiting.
A Muted Moment with a Meaningless Muffin
Sometimes a lazy summer strikes when you least expect it. For a few random days at a time, you’re surrounded by quiet, relaxing doldrums. Your TV schedule loses its pulse. Theater screens are usurped by movies clearly rated NFY (Not For You). Headline news is, if not slow per se, more irrelevant to you than usual. Sometimes a muffin with too many ingredients is the most exciting thing that’s happened to you.
Comic Shops Can Still Happen If You Want Them
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a brand new comic book shop.
The Android’s Dungeon has operated as an online store since 2009, but this year its owners saw their long-standing dream of a brick-and-mortar storefront come true. After months of searching and hoping for the right combination of location and timing, they planted stakes, opened their doors to the public in March, and made history as the first official comic shop in the ever-expanding town of Avon, Indiana.
2014 Birthday Road Trip Photos, Part 4 of 4: the Rest of Muncie!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
For the last few years, my wife and I have spent our respective birthdays together finding some new place or attraction to visit as a one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on this most frabjous day, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. My 2014 birthday destination of choice: the town of Muncie, some 75 miles northeast of here.
Sure, many people celebrate their birthday on or near the original date. Some might take photos. Some might share them in a timely manner. We keep our own schedule. And by “we” I mean “I” because my wife isn’t as prone to distractions, digressions, or long, awkward pauses between chapters in her online projects. But I couldn’t very well leave this four-part MCC miniseries incomplete. I never explicitly promised anyone four parts, but that final “To Be Continued” at the end of Part Three cried out to me for closure. Also, I could use a short break from headline news and general relevance.
Part four, then: other things we saw besides nifty stores, official works of art, or Garfield statues. The most bewildering sight of all would be the “nature area” that contained a relaxing walking path, gentle plains, breezy forest, and a sacrificial altar.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 