If I wrote books, this would be a contender for my author photo.

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…

Whenever other people travel to South Carolina — especially the hotspots of, say, Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach — they enjoy lounging in the chairs they brought along, chugging all the alcohol in sight, flirting with anyone and everyone in sight who’s doing the same, and/or frolicking willy-nilly while shouting, “BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH! BEACH!” The two of us figured out years ago we aren’t beach people.

Sure, we’ve walked around a few, just so we could say we’d tried them. In 2007, my very first time ever laying eyes upon a real live ocean, a severe thunderstorm chased us off Cocoa Beach. The following year, we approached Virginia Beach on a perfect summer day. We came, we saw, we wandered, we made feeble sculptures, and we wondered, “Is that it?” In 2015 we learned at Mississippi’s Harrison County Sand Beach that it’s pretty fun to have a beach all to yourself for goofing around at 8 in the morning, but it still wasn’t somewhere we wanted to linger, burn, and watch skin cancers manifest in real time.

By our final South Carolina morning we’d hit all the primary objectives on our vacation to-do list and figured, hey, the Atlantic Ocean was still right there. It’s famous and massive and it’s not like we’ve seen all of it yet, so maybe one walk on a beach couldn’t hurt and might not even bore us. Our tour of Fort Sumter had thrown in a few sandbars for free, but that wasn’t a certified beach-beach, with umbrellas and volleyball and concession stands and lifeguards and one-percenter hotels obscuring half the horizons around us. For our last hurrah in the Charleston vicinity, Anne picked us a beach from among the numerous options that we could check out before we had to leave town and begin the long trip back northwest toward duller, smoggier climes.

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