Tag Archives: restaurants

On the Unthinkable Occasion of Our 20th Wedding Anniversary

July 18, 2024 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Us doing jazz hands in front of an enlarged photo of George Washington's mansion.

Fun times at George Washington’s Mount Vernon on our 2024 road trip.

It’s that time again! Another year of blessed bliss married to the amazing Anne, another “Happy Anniversary to Us!” entry, another dinner to celebrate, and another nearly unrelated lead image. This year’s milestone is also a multiple of 5, so society says it’s worth extra skill points!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: two geeks met in 1987 in high school German class, somewhat out of sync with the ordinary folks around us. Divine timing would keep our unplanned parallel paths intertwining over the years. Everything led up to our determinedly simple wedding in 2004, by which time we best friends had already started traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, chuckles and tears, aches and pains, and mountains and valleys both figurative and literal.

We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

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The Blue 52

May 21, 2024 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Chocolate dessert! Refer to caption.

Our Friday night dessert, one for each of us: Chocolate Terrine on graham cracker crust with ganache, blackberry cheesecake ice cream, blackberry sauce, and a real blackberry on top.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last Friday was my birthday, which I usually note here with gratitude for another year of survival. For years I assumed when I turned 52 I’d celebrate with some geektastic solipsism involving that very number’s use as a recurring DC Comics motif. I had at least one whole anecdote lined up and everything. So far the closest we’ve come to living out any DC homage is the cosmic irony of having the entire lead-up week disrupted by, to put it horridly, a major character death.

The week was instead overshadowed by the unexpected passing of my cousin Shawn on Mother’s Day at age 50, two years younger than me. I never throw parties anyway, but I begged off some of our traditions with hopes of resuming them next year — no evening spent entirely on Facebook (the only social media system remotely nice about birthdays), no one-day road trip with my wife Anne away from Indianapolis, and no ice cream cake. I never post about the ice cream cake, but it’s usually my thing.

Nevertheless we tried to find and/or create some bright spots where we could throughout the week. Mostly I mean food.

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How We Spent This Blog’s 12th Anniversary: A C2E2 2024 Epilogue

May 11, 2024 By in Meta, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Nighttime view of a cross-section of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. Lit-up things include many windows, a Marriott logo with the second T obscured by a building corner, and the lightsaber atop Trump Tower.

The view from our Chicago hotel under cover of darkness, where none might find us among the millions in the big city. Kinda like loners on the internet.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there.

I commemorate MCC’s every anniversary here, but this year my wife Anne and I were busy that weekend, preoccupied by the geek gala that was C2E2 2024. We spent the site’s 12th anniversary not really thinking about it — much like the rest of the world, really. Rather than dwell on my dozen years of toiling in obscure hermitage on this tiny, mostly unpaid quasi-boutique hobby-job, we can instead center our closet-sized soiree on two of our favorite topics that come up whenever time and experience permit: travel and food.

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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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The October 2023 Birthday Trip, Part 1 of 6: Two Lunches at Brau Haus

October 21, 2023 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne smiling at me across the table inside a restaurant with green and brown decor. Sunlight pours in a window at left.

The lovely birthday gal who refuses to age.

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. Friday on our way from Indianapolis to Cincy we spent the afternoon in the Hoosier town of Oldenburg, where German roots run deep and our curiosity abounded. The two of us met in 1987 in high school German class. We can get sentimental sometimes when we’re reminded of that.

The Oldenburg prelude to the Stewart event wasn’t part of our original travel plan. Two weeks earlier, we’d stopped for lunch on the way to Cincinnati Comic Expo at a German diner my boss had strongly recommended. The Brau Haus is housed in the Stuerwald Building, which was built in 1860 as a general store and is one of eighty 19th-century places still standing to this day in their historic district. We loved the food and hospitality so much that we decided a Brau Haus encore would go great with our Cincinnati encore. That gave us two lunches’ worth of highlights to share, taken two weeks apart.

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Dragon Con 2023 Photos #12 of 12: Three Days of the Con-Doers

September 20, 2023 By in Conventions & Events Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Dragon Con ribbons affixed to Anne's badge, mostly Star Trek-themed.

Ribbons to affix to your badge, the quintessential Dragon Con souvenir.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. As one of the longest-running science fiction conventions in America, Dragon Con had received rave reviews from our internet friends over the past two decades, some of whom recommended it to us more than once and, according to my notes, would never shut up about it. We had so much of a blast that we returned in 2021. Third time was the charm this Labor Day weekend as we repeated the eight-hour drive from Indianapolis to that amazing colossal southern spectacle…

…and it all comes down to this: what else we did at the big show besides meet actors and see thousands of cosplayers swarming everywhere. In keeping with our personal boundaries, we only attended Friday and Saturday, but that experience was more than enough for us aging geeks.

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The Food After the Fan Expo Chicago 2023 End Credits

August 24, 2023 By in Mundane, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Closeup of a fish sandwich over half the size of Anne's head.

Incredibly, Anne ate this entire head-sized sandwich herself and did not win a free T-shirt.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order…

Much as other convention-goers have their traditions, so do we here at MCC. One such tradition is waiting till our site traffic dies down — and other aspects of our lives are caught up — before we share some of the bonus ephemera that can bore wider audiences. Sometimes that includes food photos, in cases where we’ve found sustenance that left an impression on us within reasonable distance of a given show. We don’t indulge in all the classic blogging tropes here, but on occasion we still brake for food photos. They’re a fun memory, a quick excuse for posting something during busy or preoccupied times, and an even quicker scroll-through for You, The Viewers at Home. If you read all 6300+ words of our Fan Expo Chicago actor-meetup recap, this is the opposite of that.

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Doughnuts & Dragons Sails Into the West

July 29, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Six donuts in a white box. See caption.

Our last breakfast, as it were: chocolate long john, cinnamon braid, key lime pie, white chocolate raspberry, strawberry shortcake, and Butterbeer (vanilla and cream soda cake donut with butterscotch icing).

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: this isn’t officially a foodie blog, but restaurants are among the many and varied subjects we touch upon, as we refuse to focus on a singular topic and don’t care one bit about the damage done to our SEO standings. Whether they’ve enlivened our annual road trips, featured in our wedding anniversary celebrations, given us something to do on Super Bowl Sunday, or simply welcomed us in for one-time tryouts, restaurants are a treasured aspect of our travel experiences, in other states as well as around our own hometown of Indianapolis. This weekend we bade farewell to another creative establishment from a past entry.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #30: The Cleveland Wahlbergs

May 28, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne with a huge smile hoisting a mug of orange Creamsicle. On the table is a Wahlburgers menu.

After a long week Anne enjoys the refreshing taste of an orange Creamsicle float. (Nonalcoholic, natch.)

Once we again we’re winding down another travelogue with chapters nowhere near as exciting as the ones in the middle. The very design of our vacations and my insistence on chronological storytelling together mean pretty much every MCC miniseries ends anticlimactically. Not once have we driven 4-to-20 hours out of town and scheduled the biggest and best attraction as the very last thing we do on our way home. If you’ve remained a longtime reader, I trust you understand the nature of the pastime.

Cleveland first appeared in our lives in 2004, when my car broke down on our way home from Niagara Falls. C-Town had a stronger costarring role in our 2013 adventures, replete with stops at a rockin’ museum, a Christmas movie house, an iconic comic-book legend’s house, the second-tallest Presidential burial site we’ve seen to date, and a memorial statue I helped fund. That was a good set of experiences.

This year, Cleveland was an anticlimax again. In some ways it wasn’t their fault. Some ways.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #28: Utica’s Golden

April 30, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A shiny gold dome amid several tall buildings on a cloudless day.

New York has a cool gold dome like numerous other states, but it’s neither in their capital nor on their capitol.

Fun trivia: billboards have been banned in Vermont since 1968 — one of four states to do so, along with Maine, Alaska and Hawaii. Among other benefits, their lawmakers’ efforts definitely helped improve all those Green Mountains pics we’ve posted throughout this series. Alas, not long after we crossed the border back into the east end of New York State, we found ourselves in the middle of another batch of mountains covered in lush forests from peak to base, but with one (1) great big Denny’s ad in the middle, jutting out like a zit newly erupting on a teenage forehead an hour before prom night.

Moving past that, upstate New York had more sights we actually wanted to see, including a return engagement with a city that got short shrift on one of our previous road trips.

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