The Hollywood Wax Museum: hopefully not the closest we’ll ever come to the real thing.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Each 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. We grew up in families that couldn’t afford out-of-state vacations. We young geeks had to live vicariously through the windows of pop culture in lieu of in-person adventures. After years of settling for 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 opportunities to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own, from the horizons of nature to the limits of imagination, from history’s greatest hits to humanity’s deepest regrets and the sometimes quotidian, sometimes quirky stopovers in between. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.
2023 was a busy year for traveling and special occasions as the pandemic and its anxieties receded. In addition to our Midwest comic-con resurgence, in March we took our very first trip to Disney World as wonderstruck fiftysomethings; at the end of June we made our first foray into the Carolinas with an emphasis on the Charleston area. The out-of-town respites didn’t stop there: at summer’s end we turned the week leading up to Labor Day into a special combo package: a convention and road trip.
That Labor Day weekend marked our third visit to Dragon Con in downtown Atlanta — one of America’s longest running events for folks like us from across all fandoms, hobbies, and geek interests, which the two of us have made a biannual tradition. We already shared hundreds of photos from our three days in the thick of it all, posted as quickly as I could after we returned home and recuperated. Before reaching Georgia we made a few other stops along the way whose photos I never got around to adding to the blog collection. I could list the excuses why or I could just show them to you now. Onward, then?
