Birthday Quest 2018, Part 1 of 6: Garfields of Dreams

Garfield @ Upland!

Arguably our first-ever photo of a “jazz paw”.

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a tradition of spending our respective birthdays together on one-day outings to some new place or attraction — partly as an excuse to spend time together in honor of our special days, partly to explore areas of Indiana (or in neighboring states) that we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

For my birthday last year we drove all the way to Michigan for a comic convention. That’s an average expedition for us, but this one required a five-hour drive that proved a bit much to cram into a single weekend. The con itself was a fabulous experience; the next several fatigued work days after, not remotely so. I wouldn’t mind doing that show again someday, but not as an annual event.

This time I decided to keep us slightly closer to home. The answer still involved comics, though not the “book” kind. It was a direct sequel to a previous birthday trip. And it was loosely inspired by video games.

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The Benjamin Harrison 2012 Halloween Birthday Special

Benjamin Harrison!

Hi, I’m President Benjamin Harrison! You may remember me from such films as…wait, no, you wouldn’t.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: longtime readers and friends know my wife Anne is a history buff who brakes for Presidential grave sites, a common must-see on our annual road trips. In past entries we’ve so far shared our experiences with twelve dead Presidents of the United States of America as follows:

In the middle of that timeline is one we never got around to sharing: that time we visited the one and only Presidential burial site in our own home state of Indiana.

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Not Put Asunder, 14 Years and Counting

Us and Rocky!

From our return to Philadelphia last week. We were one of three couples taking turns taking each other’s photos with Rocky Balboa.

It’s that time again! Another year of shockingly blissful marriage to the amazing Anne, another anniversary dinner to celebrate. We just got back from our 2018 road trip a few days ago and have yet to recover fully, but we refuse to let fatigue and battle damage hamper our personal festivities. As I’ve mentioned before, maybe it’s best not to brag too proudly, but fourteen years is no easy feat in a world of increasingly disposable relationships that’s maybe two or three steps away from inventing drive-thru divorces and frequent-philanderer reward programs.

Dinner this year was at a relatively new place down the street called Kaza Maza, quite possibly the first Moroccan/Mediterranean cuisine ever to grace our side of town. Other than some issues with the Coke Zero, we wouldn’t change a thing about the evening. ‘Twas a fine place to celebrate love and marriage and to forget about the part where we had to return to our day jobs this week.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 24: Outtakes Off I-90 West

Day 6 Devils Tower!

Welcome to Devil’s Tower. I’m your host, TV’s Wilford Brimley.

It’s a time-honored MCC tradition: every road trip concludes with bonus photos I skipped while compiling all the preceding chapters. However, this finale is a little more special than average.

Effective with this very entry, every single one of our annual road trips is now officially available for perusal and literary analysis on MCC from 1999 to 2017. All the major vacations from MCC’s 2012 inception to the present have been housed here exclusively from the get-go. As of today, all our prior travelogues from 1999 to 2011 have now been reposted and reformatted here for our own personal library to be shared with one and all — our lifelong, immutable road trip canon. Some write-ups were reprinted word-for-word, but in several cases extensive rewrites felt necessary and/or fun.

This curatorial project has been years in the making, and has now reached its final major milestone. It’s kind of a nice feeling.

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Welcome to the Hotel Impostor Syndrome

Hotel!

Such a lovely place. Was all this a mistake?

I’m typing at you live from downtown Albany, New York, one of the stopovers on our 2018 road trip, where our hoteliers have gone overboard in assigning accommodations that appear far beyond our means, either because it’s an extremely slow night for them, or because either Anne or I resemble one of their local politicians. Probably Anne.

Pictured above is half our room. Well, almost half.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 23: 300 Miles from Steak to Cake

Iowa Machine Shed!

WELCOME TO SHED. YOU COME HAVE FOOD, NO, NOT TOOLS. THAT IS OTHER KIND OF SHED.

It all comes down to this: the last leg of our long, long trip. We began with friends; we concluded with family.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 22: The Town on the Edge of Forever

Shuttlecraft!

DISCLAIMER: Not a working spacecraft yet.

Our first venture into the state of Iowa left a lot to be desired, but it was a milestone in our travels: the first time we ever visited the birthplace of a famous personality before they were born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Staking Claims at Mamaw’s House

Mamaw Stuff!

To the living go the leftovers.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: on June 7th my wife’s grandmother passed away, six days before her 93rd birthday. From 2011 to 2017 my wife Anne and I would take her out twice per year to the Indiana State Fairgrounds for her two favorite outings, the Indiana Flower & Patio Show and the Christmas Gift & Hobby Show. Longtime MCC readers have been treated to the resulting photo galleries and occasional cute Mamaw photos — her in her wheelchair and me as her chauffeur. While the better relatives would come over and visit her from time to time, not all of them took her places. I was among the precious few who stepped up to the privilege of being her personal driver in that sense.

The ongoing postmortem process has moved at a glacial pace in the ten days since her passing. Over this weekend the family got to the part where they begin dividing up the stuff she couldn’t take with her. As far as we know, she didn’t have a will drawn up, nor did she have enough extravagant possessions to her name to merit bitter feuding in lieu of one. The house itself is ultimately spoken for, but for now an aunt and a cousin are acting as estate wranglers, for lack of an actual, legally opened estate. This means they’ve been allowing close relatives to take turns coming over and picking out whatever mementos they’d like, within reason.

Today was Anne’s turn. Behold a selection from her de facto inheritance.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 14: Rushmore!

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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R.I.P. Geppi Museum: A 2017 Road Trip Epilogue

Batcave Shakespeare!

Once upon a time, this dead author was the gateway to a crimefighter’s lair. Who knows where he’s headed next.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year since 1999 my wife Anne and I have taken a trip to a different part of the United States and visited 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. For 2017 our ultimate destination of choice was the city of Baltimore, Maryland. You might remember it from such TV shows as Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, not exactly the most enticing showcases to lure in prospective tourists. In the course of our research we were surprised to discover Baltimore also has an entire designated tourist-trap section covered with things to do.

As a fan of comic books for nearly four decades and counting, I wish I could say we find comic-related tourist attractions everywhere we go, but that’s nearly never the case. Leave it to one of the most powerful men in the comics industry ever so kindly to place one in our Baltimore path. And not just comics — Geppi’s Entertainment Museum is a haven for collectible 20th-century pop culture in general.

Its founder and namesake is Steve Geppi, also the founder and owner of Diamond Comics Distributors, the near-monopolistic juggernaut through which the vast majority of American comic shops are required to receive their weekly comics and ancillary products. Geppi has been a leading figure in the industry since the 1970s, with Diamond rising to indispensable prominence when the tumultuous 1990s market saw the company either outliving or outright buying its competitors. In 2006 Geppi — himself a big fan of all those worlds — decided to try something different and opened his Entertainment Museum on the second floor of the former B&O Railroad Station, with its exhibits curated out of his own enormous personal collections.

As of June 3, 2018, those paragraphs became past tense.

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Our 2009 Road Trip, Part 13: Warrior in Progress

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 Excuse for Skipping Three Conventions in One Weekend

Wedding Cake!

Actual wedding cake.

Dear Mr. Kotter,

Please excuse Randy and Anne Golden for skipping the Superman Celebration, Wizard World Columbus, and Indy Pop Con all at the same time. As evidence of their whereabouts, I submit Exhibit A: a photo of the official cake from the wedding they attended Saturday afternoon. Anne’s cousin and his new bride were the heart and soul of a wondrous occasion that marked quite a happy ending to a story that’s none of your business, if I may say so without you giving everyone detention. Also, in reply to your weird expression, yes, that is too a wedding cake.

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

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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