Tag Archives: downtown

Our 2023 Road Trip #12: Morning Stroll Down King Street

August 3, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
curving street with stores and palmettos on either side. At the bend is a tall clock tower.

Downtown Charleston, brought to you by the Palmetto Council!

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.

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Our 2023 Road Trip #5: Columbia Records

April 7, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Anne selfie with Hootie guitar-pick plaque on the ground.

Selfie time with Columbia’s sidewalk tribute to hometown legends Hootie and the Blowfish.

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…

After one last pit stop in North Carolina’s western proboscis, in the town of Columbus…

TOTAL ROAD TRIP MILEAGE AS OF GAS STOP #2: 558.0.

…Day Two continued southeast down I-26 as we entered South Carolina for our first time. Deciduous trees gave away to sturdier, more heat-resistant species along the way from Columbus to Columbia, where we’d search for art, food, and musical tributes, not necessarily in that order.

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So Many Signs: Indianapolis Redecorates for the 2024 Coming of Taylor Swift

October 29, 2024 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Giant Taylor Swift mural on the front of a Marriott whose face is all blue glass. She has a pink guitar.

Attack of the 300-Foot Taylor Swift!

TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING! TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING! TAYLOR SWIFT IS COMING!

Here in Indianapolis, our local media are positively ecstatic to have anything to talk about besides politics, homicides, and the city’s increasingly toxic levels of road construction. For those just joining us: Ms. Swift’s Eras Tour will be stopping in Indy this weekend to play three nights at Lucas Oil Stadium. While she and her entourage take over the place, our Indianapolis Colts will be staying with buddies in Minnesota until someone calls and gives them the okay to come back, which will depend on how they do Sunday against the Vikings.

Tickets to her sold-out Hoosier trilogy are still available through the usual auction sites and scalpers for four-digit sums, so don’t expect live coverage from me. Downtown hotel rooms are sold out across the board, though some are available around the edges of town and in the suburbs. Tourists are welcome to fill those up as well, but please be aware, when planning how to get from your hotel to the stadium, the first several hundred Google results for “mass transit Indianapolis” are a long list of pipe dreams sprinkled with a few nice tries.

In preparation for the influx of hundreds of thousands of folks into our modest city, they’ve gussied up our downtown! In addition to the amazing colossal Swift temporarily pictured on the giant blast-shield Marriott on West Street, thirty-two new street signs have been posted at various intersections, pretending to rename them after her songs and albums. I work downtown four days a week and own four of her CDs, so I felt I ought to do something resembling participation. Monday afternoon I sent myself on a side quest at lunchtime to take a long walk and see how many of those signs I could spot before my feet were ground into mulch. Please enjoy this gallery of results, a fraction of the total signage out there for the gawking all this week!

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Our Saturday Matinee at “A Christmas Carol” Live

December 24, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
My wife Anne wearing a blue Christmas sweatshirt and a red afghan scarf, smiling and standing in front of a theater stage covered in fake snow. It's mostly dark but with select house on, including a few replica London street lights.

My wife Anne amid the reimagined snowscape of Victorian London.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we don’t patronize live theater nearly often enough. Sure, we’ve visited New York City twice and strolled among those bright Broadway lights to catch popular favorites like The Lion King and Wicked. As for local theater here in Indianapolis…we’ve been shamefully negligent. My high school English classes took the occasional field trip to the Indiana Repertory Theatre — our most celebrated performance venue, but hardly our only stage — where my poor teenage self (whose family otherwise could never afford such extravagances) had the permission-slipped privilege to see productions of Macbeth (in minimalist postmodern with translucent walls), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals (original source of “malapropism”, a useful word to fans of The Office), and Julius Caesar (starring no less an American celebrity than Family Ties‘ Michael Gross). My last engagement was thirty-three years ago.

Fast-forward to today: Anne and I had been discussing our omissions of local cultural experiences when an opportunity came up this holiday season: free tickets to the IRT’s annual performance of A Christmas Carol, courtesy of my employer (one of their nonprofit organization’s longtime sponsors). We kept our calendar clear, took advantage of the offer, and enjoyed a Christmas activity that for once had nothing to do with crowded family gatherings or big-screen movies with snow in them.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #19: Buy Buy Burlington

November 7, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Big Joe Burrell statue in Burlington, Vermont

A 2010 statue of Vermont jazz legend Big Joe Burrell, who played with the likes of B.B. King, Count Basie, and Phish.

We’re not high-end shoppers who get caught anywhere near boutiques, jewelers, perfumeries, fashion trendsetters, or home decor artisans unless they happen to be next door to the retailers we’d rather visit. And by “we” I especially mean “I”. Anne’s collecting habits are modest bordering on spartan, whereas I’m the one on the lookout for brick-and-mortar purveyors who cater to my hobbies and pop culture interests. Fortunately Burlington had just the district for us.

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The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 2 of 10: Welcome to Corydon

October 28, 2022 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
glass pumpkin in sunshine!

A glass pumpkin for the autumn occasion at Zimmerman Art Glass in Corydon.

Okay, prologue aside, now we get to October 14th’s primary objective.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

In October 2022 Anne turned 52. Indiana offers no shortage of tourist attractions for history aficionados like her. We’ve visited quite a few of those over the years, but this year we felt it was time to check off one of the Hoosier State’s biggest trivia answers: Corydon, our original state capital before Indianapolis…

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The Road to Dragon Con 2021, Part 7 of 8: The Atlanta Outtakes

August 14, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Atlanta light pollution!

New adventures in Atlanta light pollution.

Last time in Atlanta we allowed a full-length vacation for the opportunity to explore its major institutions, roadside attractions, and grade-A restaurants. The encore presentation was scheduled on a much more compressed timeline for the sake of saving money and conserving our vacation days. That meant seeing less of the city outside our Dragon Con experience, but we caught new glimpses here and there.

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Indianapolis Super Bowl XLVI Memories, Part 3: The Village and the City

February 10, 2022 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
JW Marriott, Super Bowl 46!

The J.W. Marriott was a recent addition to the downtown skyline and clearly marked where the party started,

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Once upon a time, and exactly once, Indianapolis hosted a Super Bowl. Back in 2012 our li’l city earned its first chance to host the big game. Thanks to tremendous teamwork among numerous organization and bodies cooperating under Mayor Greg Ballard, the Circle City welcomed untold thousands of visitors for a super-sized weekend of football mania, Hoosier tourism, and limited-time-only activities that welcomed all brought our downtown alive. It was a unique occasion that everyone in town could appreciate, including those of us who aren’t into sports, have never watched an entire football game — nary a Super Bowl, not even for the ads — and have never been invited to a Super Bowl party. We found ways to get into the spirit of the proceedings anyway.

All of this happened three months before Midlife Crisis Crossover launched. At the time I simply shared pics and stories with online friends, then reused a tiny selection of that material here on MCC one year later. I can’t remember why I was so stingy and only reposted eleven photos from among the dozens of relevant ones, including an entire quest involving citywide art. This past week our local media outlets have been holding their tenth-anniversary celebrations of that time we all did a Super Bowl together. That means it’s the perfect time for a remastered version of the tale of how we spent January 27-28, 2012, the weekend before Super Bowl 46…this time in trilogy form!

It all comes down to this: the other stuff we saw in and around downtown Indy in those momentous days when hometown pride was at an all-time high and football fervor dwarfed the local loves of auto racing and our precious basketball for just a bit.

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“Last Night in Soho”: Eloise’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass

November 4, 2021 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Last Night in Soho!

The Doctor vs. Illyana Rasputin: who wins?

As a kid I spent a lot of summertime Friday nights with my mom and grandma at the drive-in down the street. For a poor family like ours, drive-ins were cheaper than indoor theaters, especially if you stayed late and caught two or three films for the price of one. The concession stands served fried grub as affordable as any contemporary fast-food joint. Until the feature presentation rolled at sundown, free preshow entertainments abounded. Audience members could set out lawn chairs and mingle with folks they know in the next parking space over. Kids could goof around on the playground in front of the screen. And in the years before some entrepreneur figured out how to patch the soundtrack into a short-range FM signal, you could hang one of the drive-in’s own heavy, tinny, awkward mono speakers on your window, crank up the plastic white knob, and listen to the prefab radio program spinning the exact same songs at every showing for years until the drive-in closed in 1982 and was demolished to make way for boring medical offices.

The track listing in general — borne from the post-disco days of “easy listening” lullabies, country/western crossover hits, and ’60s leftovers-turned-standards — was a parade of inoffensive AM-radio earworms cultivated for my elders who liked their sonic backdrops as plain as a pus-colored Tupperware cup of sugarless lemonade on a wind-free porch. In the years ahead I’d come to develop my own musical tastes as the opposite of all that. To this day they’re why I respond poorly to slow jams, twee ballads, and somnambulist Starbucks-CD jangle-pop. Despite my youngster’s apathy, one single would catch my attention above all others every time: Petula Clark’s “Downtown”.

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Wandering The 2020 Christmas Shopping Wastelands

December 16, 2020 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Mall Walking.

Deck the malls with melancholy, fa la la la la, la la la…la?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: it’s a very special pandemic Christmas! Wait, no, not “special”. I meant “panic-stricken”.

This year I was determined to do as much of my Christmas shopping in person as possible, which worked well for me last year. Comparing 2019 to 2020 is like comparing apples and cyanide pills, but here I am anyway, trying to buck the American trend of relying on Amazon for any and every human acquisition need like a newborn infant relies on its parents for basic feeding and sanitation. So far in 2020 I’ve ordered from Amazon four times, my lowest total since 2008. The fact that Amazon keeps that information on file so I could actually fact-check myself is kind of creepy and further justifies my decision to pursue other shopping venues regardless of the added cost.

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