Tag Archives: nostalgia

Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 21: 2 Wild 2 Kingdom

July 3, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
white tiger!

A white tiger happy to get some peace and quiet far away from Siegfried and Roy.

I’m typing this on the Third of July, Independence Eve, a time when a lot of internet users are either binge-watching, traveling, or stocking up on recreational explosives to celebrate the United States of America’s birthday (observed). Clicking is down, my energy levels are even farther down, my movie reviews are caught up for now, my to-do list for coming events feels infinite in length, and I have six episodes of Luke Cage season 2 left to burn through. For my own reasons I don’t feel like skipping MCC too much this week, but now’s not the time for that 2000-word essay on social awkwardness that’s been coalescing in my head since last December.

Oh, hey, everyone loves animals, right?

Eureka.

(P.S.: Happy Fourth of July from us here at Midlife Crisis Crossover! Remember, don’t drink and firecracker, especially around pets, who hate hate HATE your proud fireworks display.)

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 20: Omaha’s Wild Kingdom

July 2, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Owl!

Paranoid owl is ON TO YOU.

Longtime MCC readers know we made a habit of doing at least one zoo or amusement park on every road trip while he was young, as a compromise so he’d have something to look forward to besides history museums and roadside oddities. As for this particular trip, you’d think we’d be burned out on animals by now after our experiences at Custer State Park and Reptile Gardens. Regardless of redundancy or overkill, Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo came recommended to us, and gave us a benign activity to kick off what would become yet another day of never-ending driving.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 19: Mutual in Omaha

June 29, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anthony's!

At last, a restaurant that really speaks to me!

Readers who’ve been following this miniseries may recall that time in the earlier chapters when we got together in Chicago with friends from our long-lived online fan community, which will be celebrating its twentieth birthday in 2019, Lord willing. In 2009 they weren’t the only friends we met along the way.

No, I don’t mean the cow statue.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 18: Last Exits in South Dakota

June 28, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Tiny Church!

You say your congregation is dwindling? You haven’t seen a really shrunken church.

Another long day lay ahead — 520 miles of driving, over 370 of that in South Dakota alone. If you’re patient and don’t sleep the whole distance through, points of interest and oddity poke through the panoramas.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 17: Deadwood’s of Hollywood

June 25, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Wild Bill Shot Here!

If you’ve ever seen Keith Carradine’s version of Wild Bill Hickok on TV’s Deadwood, here’s your chance to add a caption. I haven’t, so I got nothing.

One of the hard parts of every road trip is realizing that once you’ve seen the biggest, boldest attraction on your to-do list, you can’t just teleport home. You still have hundreds of miles to go before you can relax, and a bunch of other sightseeing options yet to come, all of them inferior to the majesty of the awesome thing you just witnessed. You can’t surrender to discouragement, though. You committed to the drive, and now you have to finish it, no matter how some of your later stops may make you roll your eyes and wish you were back in front of the awesome thing again.

On a related note, here’s that time we dropped by the actual Deadwood, the capital of mixed-use casinos.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 16: Bedevilment at Devils Tower

June 22, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Devils Tower!

Many onlookers only know Devils Tower from that one time it worked with a young Steven Spielberg.

As of this writing I’ve visited 32 of our 50 United States. Anne has seen a few more thanks to her grandma, who drove her to Maine one time back in the ’80s. We’ve had the chance to luxuriate and wander several of those at length. Some of them were one-stop wonders, states adjacent to others that weren’t a main focus in a given trip, but were easy enough to cross off our lifetime to-do list if we could think of a reason to get out of the car and say hi. Perfect example: on our 2013 drive to Boston, we visited a Connecticut museum in our path (and weren’t enamored enough of that sketchy neighborhood to explore any further), but we couldn’t find an easy way to work Rhode Island into that year’s itinerary.

Since we were at the westernmost end of South Dakota anyway, we had wondered if we could find an excuse to hop over into its neighbor Wyoming. About two minutes of research brought us to an obvious option of inescapable prominence, by which I mean that gargantuan protuberance up there.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 15: Cold Shoulders from the Cold-Blooded

June 19, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
tortoise!

“Do I look hungry? Do I look to you like someone who needs fed like a baby?”

In the early years when my son tagged along on our travels, we made a point of including at least one amusement park or zoo on every road trip. That requirement faded as we got older, but we were happy to make time for animals if we found any interesting habitats along our paths.

Technically we’d already filled our 2009 quota at Custer State Park. We found it wasn’t South Dakota’s only wildlife habitat, and were curious to see if the Mount Rushmore State had other animals to offer besides panhandling burros and jaywalking bison.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 14: Rushmore!

June 14, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Mount Rushmore!

Photo by my son, nailing the “homemade Christmas card” aesthetic.

George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Ted “Theodore” Roosevelt. Abraham Lincoln. You might remember them from such films as North by Northwest, Superman II, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. It’s okay if you don’t remember that last one, but it’s not the last time we’ll mention it in this miniseries.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 13: Warrior in Progress

June 11, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Crazy Horse!

Y’know what’s cooler than sharing a world-famous monument with three other guys? Having your own.

Some MCC readers may be following this miniseries and thinking, “When did you get to Mount Rushmore? Are you to Mount Rushmore yet? Where’s Mount Rushmore? How much longer to Mount Rushmore? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

First of all, knock it off. Second of all, as of this chapter we’re seventeen miles away. We had someone else to see first. He’s taller, he’s wider, and he’s been funded with exactly $0.00 of your tax dollars, making one of the most independent art projects in American history. Show some respect and some patience. We’ll get to the white guys soon enough.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 12: Burros Barge in Where the Buffalo Roam

June 9, 2018 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
burro!

That time we came under scrutiny from the South Dakota Burro of Investigation.

In the early years when my son tagged along on our travels, we made a point of including at least one amusement park or zoo on every road trip. That requirement faded as we got older, but we were happy to make time for animals if we found any interesting habitats along our paths.

In one South Dakota state park, it was the animals’ turn to come up and stare at us.

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