It’s a familiar dream to many. You find yourself in an unreal labyrinth with imposing walls beyond your normal ken. Maybe it’s dungeon stonework, or blood-red bricks, or a solid grayness that’s nondescript yet intimidating. Maybe you’re in a pitch-black forest, or in a cornfield that towers over you on all sides.
Gifts from my coworkers: chocolate cupcakes with peanut-butter-cup centers. This is so much better than a birthday pitch-in where 9 out of every 10 participants bring potato chips.
It’s that time of year again! As of today I’m now 42 years old and decided hours ago not to contrive a Hitchhiker’s Guide joke from that. All things considered, I’m a much happier guy at 42 than I was at 21. By the time I’m old enough to want to lie about my age, I won’t be able to get away with it anymore.
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. It’s the home of Ball State University (my sister-in-law’s alma mater), hometown of Garfield creator Jim Davis, scene of a fair amount of works of art, and location for, of all things, a notable comic book shop I wanted to see.
In our previous installment, you saw signs of the forthcoming spring as heralded through the exhibits at the 2014 Indiana Flower and Patio Show. While flowers were the star attraction, they weren’t the only uncommon objects on site. The two buildings that contained this year’s show were filled with various examples of gardens, patios, spas, tools, local repairmen, self-employed salespeople, As Seen on TV hucksters, chocolate stands, and concrete constructions we’ll never be able to afford.
Also, someone turned a piano into a fountain. See, music lovers, this is what happens when you walk away from your talent and abandon your instrument: someone jams a hose in it and turns it into their patio centerpiece.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Twice per year my wife and I escort her grandmother to one of two special events at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Each November we visit the Indiana Christmas Gift and Hobby Show. Each March the highlight of her month is the Indiana Flower & Patio Show, which features numerous displays of colorful flora, booths where gardeners and homeowners can peruse and pick out their new seeds, plants, implements, and accoutrements for tending and cultivating their yards in the forthcoming spring and summer. Assorted horticulturists and lawn care companies show off bouquets, sample gardens, and ostentatious flowers you’ll wish you owned.
It’s that time of year again! Today we three traipsed around the fairgrounds and gazed upon tiny, fragile parts of God’s creation, manifest through the works of people with much greener thumbs than ours.
My wife and I spent last Saturday deep in the heart of southern Indiana, a land whose most outstanding feature is the autumnal color change that sweeps the forests and lures us city folk from our comfort zones for a spell. If you need a break from your internet addiction, it’s an eye-catching time for it, especially since that entire half of the state is largely off the grid and proud of it.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Several different Cape Cod companies offer whale-watching cruises. Your family boards a large boat with dozens of other passengers, spends an hour circumnavigating the Cape, spends another hour or two in the nearest part of the Atlantic Ocean searching for signs of whales, seeks every possible opportunity to gaze upon a real whale in the wild, and spends another hour returning to port. Their cruises are short, fast, and noncommittal compared to your average week-long Alaskan cruise. If you have no real reason to remain out to sea for days, it’s a much more affordable open-water sampling method.
Such a vacation plan begs the question: did we actually see any whales?
The answer: yes, but not an entire whale. We had no moment of cinematic majesty in which a humpback whale vaulted high above the sails in slow motion for the perfect photo op. Not once did a sperm whale jut its head out of the water and spray water through its blowhole in our faces. Nor did we witness a single second of an entire whale pod racing across the surface or dancing together in an intricately choreographed Busby Berkeley extravaganza. That would’ve been worth twice the ticket price, but you have to understand: those scenes in movies and TV shows are performed by Hollywood stunt whales. In our world, not every whale is that gifted, or that starved for human attention.
With that in mind, my family and I bring you the following display of cinema verité, in which we present what whale photography really looks like without a special effects budget. Behold the wonder of nature at its finest!
…
Twice per year my wife and I escort her grandmother to one of two special events at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Each November we visit the Indiana Christmas Gift and Hobby Show, as previously recounted. Each March the highlight of her month is the Indiana Flower & Patio Show, which features numerous displays of colorful flora, booths where gardeners and homeowners can peruse and pick out their new seeds, plants, implements, and accoutrements for tending and cultivating their yards in the forthcoming spring and summer. Assorted horticulturists and lawn care companies show off bouquets, sample gardens, and ostentatious flowers you’ll wish you owned.
It’s my understanding that the average adult is into that sort of thing. Retirees in particular seemingly transfer their forty weekly work-hours from their former rat-race grind to the soil beds surrounding their houses instead. With all that time on their hands, I imagine such handiwork is both fulfilling and possible.
My wife and struggle with this concept.
From a purely photographic perspective, our family found 2012 far from boring, to say the least. It wasn’t without its share of trials, tears, and terrors, but it’s my fervent hope that the memories of those invigorating events caught on camera should outlast the emotional scars of the uglier incidents for years to come.
Some of the following subjects are from photo parades previously shared here on MCC. Some are from events that occurred prior to MCC’s inception on April 28, 2012. Some of these are sneak previews of photo parades that have been held in reserve until the conclusion of the 2012 Road Trip series, which is not represented in this gallery since it has its very own de facto home page.
That being said: the lighter side of 2012 from my limited vantage point appeared as follows. Continue reading
Nine days. Five states. 2,887 miles. 828 photos. One mountaintop. Fourteen stops for gas. Innumerable sights and memories. Nine consecutive entries for journals written on location. Forty entries for photos, additional commentary, and hindsight. My wife and I have taken a road trip in some fashion each year since 1999 — before we were married or even dating, back when we were best friends. Our week-plus excursion to Colorado via Kansas was one of our most ambitious, successful, and draining road trips to date. Thanks sincerely to those lovable readers who followed along with us and offered encouragement throughout the process, whether in ways great or small, conscious or unwitting.
As my way of concluding the “2012 Road Trip Photos” series and holding the blogging equivalent of a post-production wrap party, please enjoy this assortment of previously unshared photos from the journey. Some are alternate viewpoints of sights you’ve seen; some are little moments bypassed till now. For the complete itinerary, check out the 2012 Road Trip checklist for the ultimate reading guide, with links to all the notes and photos, day by day. They’re a fun way to kill an afternoon or help decide how your own future trips to these locales will be even better.
Let the montage begin!
DAY TWO: my wife peeks out from underneath the F-14 Tomcat in WaKeeney, Kansas.
This week’s edition of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is the first such challenge I’ve ever attempted. It’s not a fierce competition with a major award at stake, but I feel sheepish daring to share a theme with so many top-notch professionals who do this for a living and/or have had extensive formal training. In the spirit of fun, though, I’m giving the Challenge a whirl anyway.
Behold my octet of entrants from my own collection, submitted in the categorical competition of general greenery:
1. Sugar Creek runs through Turkey Run State Park near Rockville, Indiana.
2. The Jolly Green Giant, standing tall and proud in Blue Earth, Minnesota.
Day Six of our vacation ended in Pueblo, Colorado — an address well-known to anyone who ever saw one of the famous commercials from the ’70s/’80s about the Consumer Information Center and its free catalogs by mail. For that alone, my wife and I assumed the city held world-famous status. Some of our friends disagreed, but that’s their problem, not ours. Believe it or not, TV had more than just toy commercials back then.
The two of us spent the evening visiting the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo, a pleasant downtown diversion that interested my son not one bit. This, we decided, was the perfect opportunity for a husband/wife outing. Our hometown of Indianapolis has its Canal Walk, and we enjoyed the visual diversity of the San Antonio Riverwalk in 2005. Pueblo is much smaller than either city, but its foray into the beautifying riverwalk business is fairly new, still expanding, and worth several moments of time and dallying.
I was a little surprised to reunite with the Arkansas River, the very same waterway that runs beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge back in Cañon City, a few dozen miles west of Pueblo. How nice of the Arkansas to serve as a thematic through-line to our day. Note that Pueblo has succeeded in containing the Arkansas and removing those turbulent rapids and imposing mountainside walls.
Previously on Day Six: We traveled southwest from Colorado Springs to Cañon City for the pleasure of visiting the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, home of the professed highest suspension bridge in America, with animals and performers stationed on either side so that the bridge could foster traversal between activities and sights instead of between two dusty, rugged landmasses.
At bridge level, the Rocky Mountains are your eastern horizon, while the steep banks of the Royal Gorge serve as noise barriers to the Arkansas River below.
Previously on Day Six: We traveled southwest from Colorado Springs to Cañon City for the pleasure of visiting the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, home of the professed highest suspension bridge in America, with optional attractions posted on either side to provide visitors with incentive to cross back and forth and truly enjoy the bridge experience to its fullest.
If you’re feeling saucy or afraid of swaying bridges that remind you of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you have the option of crossing the bridge on the Aerial Tram. Up to thirty-five passengers can travel 2,200 death-defying feet across a much wider gap in the Gorge than the bridge itself traverses. Pray your fellow passengers aren’t prone to panic attacks.
In part one of this miniseries-within-a-maxiseries, our intrepid band of wanderers (i.e., my family and I) began Day Six of our nine-day road trip by sallying forth from Colorado Springs to Seven Falls, a natural curiosity comprised of what they say they are, each one positioned above the other, nestled into the back of a spacious canyon with an eighteen-story metal staircase affixed to one side so that tourists aren’t required to bring their own climbing gear or jetpacks.
From the platform at the halfway point of the staircase, you can see their main observation deck called the Nest, from which most people snap their official Seven Falls souvenir photos.
Day Six of our nine-day vacation began in Colorado Springs, traveling from our east-side hotel to the Rockies on the west side of town, where resides the attraction called Seven Falls. The septet of vertically stacked waterfalls begin eighteen stories above ground, each one a direct tributary to the next one down. They’re not especially loud or powerful, merely peculiar in their natural occurrence.
They’re also apparently contained within a critically acclaimed canyon. They did it! They finally did it! They found the world’s most beautiful canyon! Congratulations, God!
With only forty-five minutes to enjoy the top of Pikes Peak as much as possible, we tried to savor the view, the thin air (for the uniqueness of the experience, not because we liked gasping), and the near-freezing temperatures that perfectly counteracted the summertime heat that had been hammering us at ground level. Alas, forty-five minutes flew by in about ten minutes flat.
One last shot for the road, then:
Once the Pikes Peak Cog Railway deposited us at the top of Pikes Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level, it was clear to all of us that Day Five had just won the vacation, if not our entire vacation history.
The views from all directions effectively narrate themselves.
The Manitou Cliff Dwellings are on the north side of Highway 24. On the other side of the highway is Manitou Springs, a cozy. woodsy town that thrives on Pikes Peak tourism. You may recall how last summer’s nightmarish wildfires made them a household name. Thankfully the coast was clear, embers were nowhere in sight, and the evacuations were called off days before our arrival. In fact, local news reports earlier that week had interviewed the townspeople about the impact of the wildfires on their economy. I like to think we did our part to reverse a little of that damage, if nothing else.
Lunch was at a restaurant called the Keg. I thought it was a mere bar when my son chose it from among several competitors, but we were starving and no one complained about his teenage presence, so I’m proud to label it as good family dining. I’m still not sure why he chose it, of all the many options surrounding us. Perhaps their wooden mascot captured his imagination with its trustworthy sign promising superlative cuisine. Maybe later we could also find a shop selling the Best Coffee in the World. I rolled with it for the sake of adventure and not-starving, and wasn’t disappointed in the least.
The south exit from the Garden of the Gods is five minutes away from Manitou Springs, where we spent the next several hours of Day Five. West of the Garden on Highway 24 are the Manitou Cliff Dwellings.
Built ages ago by the Anasazi tribe in southwest Colorado around the Four Corners area, the Dwellings were carefully lifted by their foundations and transplanted further northeast in the 1900s under the care and coordination of a well-meaning anthropologist who rightly noted that they’d been abandoned anyway.
With sweet sorrow we parted with Denver on Day Five and headed south toward Colorado Springs. The tragic wildfires had been extinguished barely a week before our arrival, but we steered clear of Waldo Canyon and other affected areas. Those affected didn’t need voyeuristic out-of-towners traipsing around for scrapbook subjects.
Our first major stop was a park west of the city called the Garden of the Gods, whose claim to fame is a collection of geological oddities that don’t remotely blend in with their surroundings. Once you reach the Visitors Center, where I stood while snapping this, you can just tell which part of the landscape is the actual Garden.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 