Tag Archives: murals

Our 2023 Road Trip #27: Frolicking in Frankfort

July 24, 2026 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
mural with flowery title Welcome to Historic Frankfort with images of Old State Capitol, Kentucky River, and a stone pedestal.

Welcome to Historic Frankfort! One of several murals around town by artist Carla Canonero Phillips.

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…

We were dying to get home on the last day of our vacation, but while we were in Frankfort visiting the Kentucky State Capitol anyway, we allowed for a small walk and, of course, lunchtime. We were lucky to find a particular block that surrounded us with art on every side.

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Our 2023 Road Trip #6: Far from Hoth

April 26, 2025 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
AT-AT sculpture 16 feet tall made of white wires, standing outside in an overgrown yard.

A lone AT-AT patrols the South Carolina wilds, unaware the war is long over.

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…

Somehow the two-day drive to Charleston felt less like a slog and more like a leisurely jaunt. I suppose it helped that we didn’t brake for as many roadside digressions as usual. After our stopover in Columbia, we enjoyed one quick sight — a modest tribute to a galaxy far, far away — before proceeding to our ultimate destination slightly farther away but not that far away.

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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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The Lincoln Birthday Weekend, Part 9: ‘Round Springfield

November 10, 2024 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Brick wall mural of Homer Simpson eating one of many pink-frosted donuts raining upon him from above. Psychedelic tattoos cover his open yellow flesh.

The third Springfield we’ve ever visited has a mural that peers into a fourth Springfield.

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 birthdays together on some new experience. On past trips we’d visited the graves, tombs, mausoleums and virtual posthumous palaces of 24 American Presidents in varying accommodations and budgets. One of the biggest names ever to grace the White House kept eluding us: Abraham Lincoln, planted a mere three hours away in Springfield, Illinois. In May 2023 I figured: let’s make his tomb a trip headliner of its very own, not a warm-up act on the road to Branson or whatever. History is technically more Anne’s fervent interest than mine, but we found plenty to do beyond reading wordy educational placards…

…and Springfield had no shortage of engagement for us out-of-towners nestled among the numerous museums and points of Lincoln-based interest — food, art, a spot of geek shopping, and Saturday morning downtown street events we hadn’t expected.

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The October 2023 Birthday Trip, Part 6 of 6: Cincinnati! With Special Guest Covington

October 29, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Nighttime view of a working-class neighborhood with a McDonald's, White Castle, a Waffle House, and a tall, cylindrical, purple-lit Radisson hotel in the distance.

The view from our Friday night hotel in Covington, Kentucky.

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 birthdays together, usually 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. That’s every May for me and every October for her. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Anne knew what she wanted to do for this year’s birthday outing way back in July: see Patrick Stewart live on stage in Cincinnati. As previously recounted, we landed fourth-row seats and had a wonderful time. But Admiral Shakespeare’s grand tour wasn’t the only thing we did that weekend…

If you’ve been following along in real time rather than discovering this website months or years down the road, I realize the numbering might seem confusing. The events of our first four chapters (i.e., our scenic walking tour of Oldenburg) took place hours before Stewart’s gig, which is now retroactively Part Five of our tale. Going back and editing that entry’s title would wreak havoc behind the scenes, so we’re all going to have to live with that discrepancy, like when you’ve bought six books in a seven-part series but end up completing the set with a mismatched edition of the seventh from a years-later reissue in the wrong size, font, design and cover painter. I’ll cope if you will.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #18: Champlain Happy

October 21, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Champy and Anne!

Anne meets Champy, the local celebrity mythical water monster.

By the time we reached Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, we’d seen Lake Champlain from a mountaintop, from the roadside, and from a small pier jutting into the middle of it. At lunchtime on Day Four, we were okay with seeing it yet again, but tried slowing down long enough to traipse around it and bask for a while.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #1: The Accidental Convention

August 26, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Schwarzenegger and Anne!

Dey are Arnie und Anne, und dey are going to pump [*CLAP*] you up!

Since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip each year 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 annual out-of-state vacations. We’re geeks more accustomed to vicarious life through the windows of pop culture than through in-person adventures. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any surrounding areas that also had comics and toy shops, we chucked 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, 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.

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The Fantabulous 50s Weekend, Part 9: Arts in Columbus

June 20, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
ART downtown Columbus!

The Columbus College of Art & Design’s Art Sign will celebrate its 21st birthday this coming Thursday.

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.

I’ve just now lived to see 50, and after weeks of research and indecision, we planned an overnight journey to the next state over, to the capital city of Columbus, Ohio, which had cool stuff that this now-fiftysomething geek wanted to see. Columbus, then, would be the setting for our first outing together as quintagenarians…

The miniseries’ end is near! But first, the stuff we skipped and some stuff we didn’t get to yet. Mostly it’s about the birthday guy doing some self-indulgent geek sopping, chancing into a few flourishes of local art along the way, and a few loose ends that fit nowhere into the miniseries except here, the catchall chapter.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #39: Chasing Royalty Across State Lines

February 20, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Super Mario wall Fargo!

Who among us has not known the stress of a Goomba nipping at their heels?

Day Eight began and ended in very different places, yet not so different as we compared notes between a pair of murals that have nothing to do with each other unless you dig too deeply beneath the surface.

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Super Bowl XLVI Indianapolis Memories, Part 2 of 3: (Some of) the 46 for XLVI Murals

February 6, 2022 By in Indiana, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
PAmela Bliss, My Affair with Kurt Vonnegut.

“My Affair with Kurt Vonnegut” by Pam Bliss, one of the city’s fan-favorite murals, stands along trendy Massachusetts Ave.

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!

Regarding the aforementioned art quest:

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Our 2021 Road Trip #16: Rapid City Remainders

October 24, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Rapid City Native statue!

Hunkayapi (“Tying on the Eagle Plume”), sculpted in 2007 by Dale Claude Lamphere. [UPDATED 11/10/2023, per the comments section.]

IF you’re taking your family on a traditional South Dakota vacation, Rapid City is your target destination. As we found in 2009, its plentiful hotels are a reasonable distance from many tourist attractions — the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Custer State Park, and more. With a slightly longer hop-skip-jump, it’s also a springboard to Deadwood and Devil’s Tower. Rapid City is no Manhattan, but its tourism game is strong.

But we didn’t want to spend our entire 2021 vacation on do-overs. Among our new activities on the itinerary: taking a look inside Rapid City itself.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #3: 4-Wheel Gawks in an 18-Wheel World

July 31, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
IOWA 80 Truck Stop!

YOU THERE! TURN HERE! GO ENJOY! DO IT NOW! DO IT! NOW NOW NOW!

Among the roughly six hundred million Americans who’ll tell you road trips are their specialty right before sending you a link to their blog that you’ll never click on, Anne and I are merely meek, doughy amateurs compared to the real road-tripping professionals. I don’t mean canceled Travel Channel hosts or social media influencers with sports cars or wanted homicidal fugitives. I mean America’s truck drivers. They’ve been to more states than we have, they’ve seen more horrors than we ever will, they’ve brushed off more honking and more middle fingers than I hope I’ll ever have to, though I should probably stop competing with them on that front and maybe moderate some of my driving habits.

I imagine truck drivers scoff at civilians who take too much pride in their weaksauce hundreds-of-mile journeys taken in their puny four-wheeled jalopies. Truck drivers also have bragging rights for the fact that they get paid for all that driving, extremely unlike us pretenders. But they do have one thing in common with us: they love to be spoiled while they’re on the road. To those discerning highway kings and queens, Iowa offers quite the extended roadside intermission.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #1: Return of the Roadside

July 26, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Danville Illinois celebrity mural.

An all-star cast welcomes you to our latest travel chronicle!

Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken a road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. We were each raised in a household that couldn’t afford annual out-of-state family vacations. We’re geeks more accustomed to vicarious life through the windows of pop culture than through in-person adventures. Eventually we tired of some of our self-imposed limitations and figured out how to leave the comforts of home for the chance to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, 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.

Continue reading →

The Spring Birthday 2021 Trip, Part 3 of 8: Had Myself a Ball in a Small Town

May 31, 2021 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
John Mellencamp mural, Seymour, Indiana.

A very special 2019 creation on the side of a guitar shop by muralist Pamela Bliss, whose work also adorns several buildings in downtown Indianapolis.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

For the past several years my wife Anne and I have made a tradition of going somewhere — anywhere but home — for each of our birthdays. Last year my birthday trip was among the billions of traditions ruined by the pandemic, all of which paled in significance to the millions of lives lost (and still counting). This year is a different story. Anne and I have each received our pairs of Pfizer shots and reached full efficacy as of April 24th. This past Friday and Saturday the two of us drove out of Indianapolis and found a few places to visit in our eminently imitable road-trip fashion…

After our lively nature walk we headed west down the highway to the city of Seymour. Hoosiers know it best as the hometown of rock star John Mellencamp, who entered the Top-40 music world under the flashier stage name Johnny Cougar, then spent years working his way back to his own while bucking dictates from record-company execs every step of the way. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite Indiana success stories.

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Lafayette Vignettes, Part 2: The Works on the Walls

March 16, 2020 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Biggie & Cobain!

Scene from an alternate timeline where Biggie Smalls and Kurt Cobain lived to cover “Ebony and Ivory”.

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 one-day road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas of Indiana we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Once upon a time in 2019 Anne decide she wanted to celebrate her birthday with a jaunt around the city of Lafayette, an hour northwest of our Indiana home. She cobbled together a short to-do list of things she wanted to see, not lengthy but enough for a leisurely afternoon — a bit of Indiana history, a bit of downtown tourism, and a bit of healthy walking…

Once we escaped Purdue’s Homecoming weekend crowds, we headed east across the Wabash River to downtown Lafayette, where we simply wanted to walk around and take in the scenery. While most locals and students busied themselves with the main event across the river, downtown was deserted except for a small farmers’ market that was wrapping up their morning shift by the time we walked up.

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 34: Independence Mall: Resurgence

December 2, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Rocky and Us!

Once again we didn’t make it to the official Rocky Balboa statue in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His smaller, more colorful twin would have to do.

Our second time in Philadelphia wasn’t meant to be a total retread of our 2010 visit. Just the same, we couldn’t resist walking past a few of the major highlights. We also couldn’t help walking past them — the parking garage underneath Independence Mall was the most convenient place to leave the car for our first few hours in town, adjacent to several new sights we wanted to see. This year we had slightly more time, somewhat better cameras, and far better maps at our fingertips, given that neither of us owned a mobile phone till 2012.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 7: The New Cornographers

May 24, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Mitchell Corn Palace!

Anne outside the Mitchell Corn Palace. Thankfully there was no danger of the walls popping at us.

The day before, we had visited the overlord of canned vegetables in Blue Earth, MN. 200 miles later, we found a place that concentrated on just one veggie in particular. Other foodstuffs didn’t play large parts, but they had one heck of a corn section.

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The Art of a Downtown Knoxville Walk

October 22, 2017 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Kool-Aid Man!

Kool-Aid Man now comes in new Graffiti Punch flavor! OH, YEAH!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Earlier in October Anne and I drove down through Kentucky and down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to meet a few fabulous folks at Fanboy Expo’s Totally Awesome Weekend, a convention we’d never done before. After we’d had another round of geek fun, we capped off our weekend with quite a bit of sightseeing (including but not limited to a giant dragon)…

After the convention and an elevator ride into the Sunsphere, lunch was an immediate necessity. Other than a restaurant choice pegged through the magic of Google Maps, we didn’t have complicated plans for our downtown wandering — head from point A to B; eat food; marvel at incidental sights along the way. The area in general and one alley in particular caught our eyes and brightened our day.

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Journey to the Heart of the Sunsphere

October 19, 2017 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Sunsphere!

That’s over 266 feet (approx. 81 meters) worth of architectural achievement up there. Of course we had to visit it.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: earlier in October Anne and I drove down through Kentucky and down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to meet a few fabulous folks at Fanboy Expo’s Totally Awesome Weekend, a convention we’d never done before. After we’d had another round of geek fun, we capped off our weekend with quite a bit of sightseeing (including but not limited to a giant dragon).

Knoxville’s most prominent landmark is the Sunsphere, one of two surviving major remnants from the 1982 World’s Fair, but this remnant enjoyed a spot of fame in an episode of The Simpsons. We showed you the iconic exterior from a distance, which for us raised an obvious question: what about the inside?

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An Afternoon Walk for Art: Our Cincinnati Comic Expo 2017 Coda

September 28, 2017 By in Misc. Media, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Toy Heritage!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last Saturday Anne and I attended the eighth annual Cincinnati Comic Expo in the heart of their downtown. Once we finished up at the show, the urge for exploration hadn’t faded yet. Last year we’d checked out a few of the local tourist attractions but had to leave some possibilities behind for future years. Our time was short, but we wanted to cross at least one objective off the outtake list.

Hence our lead photo: “Toy Heritage”.

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