Literally the closest we’ve ever been to Harlem, which was a few blocks northeast of here.
There’s that wife of mine, once again on her quest to catch ALL the dead Presidents. It would require our longest subway ride of the week, but a special treat was waiting for us at the end of the line.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Lin Ze Xu welcomes you to the south end of Chinatown, but not your opium. His 19th-century version of the War on Drugs happened long before Nancy Reagan taught us all to just say no.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Chinatown was like nothing we’d ever stepped into before — block after block of overpacked mom-‘n’-pop shops, restaurants with all-paper signage, dingy dives with no English names out front, and respectable businesses stacked atop businesses with even more businesses crammed under and between them, their streets teeming with life and bootleg lady-shopper bait (useless against my wife, who’s not into fashion shopping) and the worst smells we hope we’ll ever know, whether from the deadliest spices known to man or from all the endless displays of fresh-slaughtered seafood, some of it still writhing. My son wanted to see every single block of it, even the blocks ruled by Vietnamese or Thai shopkeepers instead of Chinese.
To learn more about the Brooklyn Bridge, MCC recommends you check out David McCullough’s The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Brooklyn Bridge. I’d loan you my wife’s copy if you lived nearby and we thought you could be trusted.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
The World Trade Center Visitors Center offered more emotions to explore and lessons to impart, but we had to skip their basement displays because we had an appointment to keep. The walk down Liberty Street, as with numerous other neighboring streets, was made of claustrophobia. I can’t imagine Storm of the X-Men flying through some of those passages without hyperventilating.
One World Trade Center as of July 2011. Reboot in progress.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
The E train took us south from the Port Authority to the world-famous World Trade Center complex, a week after Independence Day and ten years after 9/11. Someday the area will be usable and photogenic again. At this point, unless your idea of photogenic is lifesize Tonka Truck construction playsets, no such luck. But it’s interesting to dream what’ll be made of the place.
You, too, can see Alexander Hamilton in Manhattan without tickets.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Hey, kids! It’s Hamilton! And some other special guests from previous centuries.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
The east side of the Natural History Museum faces Central Park, one of the larger stops on our brainstorming list. This felt convenient enough that we sashayed on in to see what we could see before we succumbed to the summer heat.
Unda da sea! Unda da sea! Pretty you betcha, until they getcha! You’d betta flee!
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
The B train carried us from Rockefeller Center underground up north to the American Museum of Natural History. Our primary motive wasn’t to search for correlations between the real museum and its counterpart in Night at the Museum. We’ve previously visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC in 2003 and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History in 2009. Checking out NYC’s own Natural History museum seemed a logical step to continue that tradition.
Right this way for mandatory fossil pics, plus my weight on a comet!
Tourist Anne can tourist like no tourist ever touristed before. I love you, Tourist Anne!
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
“See the Empire State Building!” all the travel guides say. “Ride to the top of the Empire State Building!” they say. “The Empire State Building was in good movies! See NYC from the Empire State Building! Empty your wallet inside Empire State Building!” Getting a scenic view of Manhattan is a must, but the Empire State Building isn’t the only skyscraper in town. And what luck that we had one next door with public elevator access…for a price.
“America’s Most Trusted Newsman” are four words that appear nowhere in this chapter.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
Once we’d had our fill of the Today set, many of the remaining minutes before our 9:45 appointment were wasted on scrounging up a meal for my son, who hates breakfast food and had refused any solids at the Bouchon Bakery because his appetite never awakens till an hour or two after he does. Some tunneling through the underground Rockefeller Center shops brought us to an everyday Subway franchise, thankfully willing and equipped to serve lunch before 10 a.m. While we strode back to where we needed to be, he did his best to cram an entire five-five-dollar-five-dollar-footlong chicken teriyaki sub into his gullet as quickly as possible without choking.
He had only a few bites left of his special-needs meal when we arrived at the NBC Studios Store to kick off our official NBC Studios tour.
Right this way for the no-photos tour, a never-before-shared video, and then a few photos!
In the land of the super, it’s the super-duper who rule.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: June 10th and 11th, my wife Anne and I attended the 38th annual Superman Celebration in the city of Metropolis, Illinois. Other chapters in this special miniseries:
* Part One: Supergirl‘s Mehcad Brooks and Peter Facinelli!
* Part Two: Dueling Jimmy Olsens, Marc McClure and Michael Landes! And more guests!
* Part Three: Cosplay! Cosplay! Cosplay!
* Part Four: Views from the Super Museum!
Here in the big finale: a walkthrough of other sights and scenes from our Friday and Saturday at our favorite out-of-state small-town festival — the little moments in between the stars and the costumes. The art! The food! The machines! The more!
Back in my day, we woke up every morning to Bryant Gumbel and Indiana’s own Jane Pauley, and we liked it.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
DAY THREE — Monday, July 11, 2011.
Monday morning was our first time aboard a genuine NYC subway. Indianapolis fails in its lack of public transportation options, but we were no strangers to the concept. I first rode the Chicago El back in 1993, and the three of us had a pleasant experience aboard Washington DC’s Metro in 2003. Based on our experiences throughout our stay, the MTA has done a fine job of keeping the lines safe, clean, and consistently running. Rarely did we find any station approaching the level of cesspool squalor that movies, TV, and comics promise as the status quo.
First scheduled stop: Rockefeller Center, As Seen On TV!
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
It’s our first evening in New York City. We’re in Times Square. We’re wandering and gaping and acting like overwhelmed tourists. It’s who we are. We knew sooner or later we had to enter a store instead of just staring at their flickering big-screen ads.
They say there are eight million stories in the naked city. Nine million if you count its toys.
The glitz! The glamor! The glory! The ads for washers and insurance and Michael Bay films!
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
After escaping Newark with our lives, we docked our car at scenic Lincoln Harbor in harmless midscale Weehawken and checked in to our unexpectedly swank hotel. Despite the modest AAA three-diamond rating, our room had two flatscreen TVs, a toilet with two different kinds of flushing buttons, gold-toned bathroom fixtures, an anteroom with couch and spacious desk, luxurious non-threadbare blankets, free AT&T Wi-Fi, and an impeccable, fawning staff. We appreciated the amenities, even though we didn’t need ’em ’cause now we were all hardcore. It’s funny, how driving through Newark changes a man.
With our luggage dropped off and our sense of adventure fully stoked, we took a New Jersey Transit bus through the nearby Lincoln Tunnel (which for me was a moment of WHEEEEE! because long dark tunnels are a peculiar source of fun) and disembarked inside the legendary Port Authority, a multi-level labyrinthine nexus of countless bus stops and other mass-transit connections. Depressing, bustling, underlit, and energetic all at once, the Port Authority and its assorted mall-shaped stores would be our transportation hub for the week.
The Garden State wasn’t all bad, but I faintly recall my son not being the most cooperative photographer.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
After the brief stopover in Harrisburg, the next two hours and the next four interstates were less invigorating than I would’ve liked. The Pennsylvania Turnpike must have a monopoly on the state’s best scenery. Mostly we passed the time scanning the local radio channels and learning that the Pennsylvania airwaves are made of top-40. Fifteen channels seemed to be playing the same six songs nonstop, a statewide revival in honor of Katy Perry and Lady Ga-Ga, America’s new First Ladies or whatever.
Next stop was across the state line in New Jersey, in a verdant, elegantly sculpted community called Whippany. Judging by the slanderous slings and arrows that New Jersey has taken over the decades, we expected something like an all-white Boyz n the Hood or a low-budget adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. On the contrary, Whippany was glorious, well-paved suburbia. I love seeing stereotypes busted.
[The very special miniseries continues! See Part One for the official intro and context.]
DAY TWO — Sunday, July 10, 2011.
After unremarkable free breakfast at unremarkable hotel, we took a jaunt down the road to Harrisburg, which we’d driven through in 2010 without stopping. We’d skipped it because our searches for “Harrisburg tourism” kept turning up the Pennsylvania State Capitol dome as its #1 attraction. The same thing happened to us in 2008 with Charleston, WV, where their gold-leaf Capitol dome was virtually the only notable feature in all the city and in all the Internet. You’d think any really exciting state capital should have its Capitol Dome ranked around #7 or #8 behind a glorious selection of roadside attractions or amusement parks. We knew Harrisburg would be larger and theoretically more interesting, but Capitol domes alone don’t much preoccupy us. 2010 wasn’t the first time we’d driven through a state capital without stopping for at least one sight. (Richmond, VA, we fail to salute you!)
This year, our New Cumberland hotel was right there in the thick of Harrisburg’s interstate construction. Anne was interested but would’ve been willing to bypass it a second time if it hadn’t been so darn convenient. We were right there. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt.
Witness our first photos of Manhattan taken during — and stitched together after — our 2010 road trip, from the ferry on our way from the New Jersey shore to Liberty Island. A separate road-trip series for another time.
[Welcome to the first installment of a very special miniseries, representing the original travelogue from our family’s 2011 vacation to fabulous New York City, by which we largely mean Manhattan because we ended up skipping our to-do lists for all the other boroughs. Additional stops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania may not be proper consolation for anyone who was hoping to hear our thoughts on Coney Island or the Bronx Zoo. We’re revisiting this now because we’re planning on revisiting NYC in July 2016, hopefully with a better eye toward the areas beyond the rivers.
Some hindsight editing and modern-day commentary will be included along the way as value-added bonus features for readers old and new alike. All photos were taken either with my first Canon PowerShot or with my ancient Kodak EasyShare that became my wife Anne’s hand-me-down device for the next few years. Very little about these entries will approach 1080p quality, but we’ll do what we can with the materials at hand. Despite the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 2015, my wife saved backups of all of our digital vacation photos to Shutterfly, and you have no idea how excited I am to report that, on this very night, I’ve figured out how to download decently sized file copies for free instead of resorting to frustratingly inadequate screen shots. Science marches on.
Enjoy!]
Right this way for Chapter One in a very special MCC series! (CAUTION: It’s just a prologue.)
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Four out of every five business days I bring a home-assembly turkey-‘n’-cheese sandwich to work for lunch. It’s one of the little ways we cut budget corners so we can set aside more disposable income for conventions, vacations, comics, movie tickets, and so on. Spending eight or ten bucks a day on lunch works out to $40-$50/week, or $160-$250/ month, or $1,920-$3,000/year. That’s an awful lot of geek merchandise and travel frills to leave behind. So cheap sack lunches are the rule of my routine.
Once a week I do lunch out with a coworker. On extremely rare occasions, when I’m absolutely sick and tired of Oscar Meyer, and we didn’t have any leftovers in the fridge that I could bring to work and nuke, then I might go out alone for a bite. Pictured above from one such outing is a burrito topped with chili sauce and chili con queso, garnished by a small sidekick of salad, all from a Mexican place called Acapulco Joe’s. I’d been wanting to try it for years, but I kept forgetting it was there. From the dingy decor and rustic exterior, I hadn’t expected an arty presentation that looks like something Two-Face would order from his personal crime chef.
This mural was one of several painted on the floodwalls that separated downtown Paducah from the banks of the Ohio River. It’s the only one I photographed and therefore the greatest of them all, probably.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Once upon a time in 2001, my best friend and I chose a summertime destination different from the conventions we’d attended the two previous years. At the southern tip of Illinois and across the Ohio River from Paducah, KY, the small town of Metropolis devotes the second weekend of every June to their world-famous Superman Celebration.
Yes, Metropolis was fun and the Celebration itself had its share of vivid personalities and eye-catching exhibitions, but far be it from us to drive three hundred miles, engage in a single activity, then do an about-face and retreat without surveying some of the nearby environs. Because road-trip science demanded further investigation.
Right this way for preserved bits and pieces of Paducah from fourteen years ago!
Look, up on the bucket list! It’s a bird sanctuary! It’s a plane hangar! It’s the SUPER MUSEUM!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Once upon a time in 2001, my best friend and I chose a summertime destination different from the conventions we’d attended the two previous years. At the southern tip of Illinois and across the Ohio River from Paducah, KY, the small town of Metropolis devotes the second weekend of every June to their world-famous Superman Celebration.
Much of the Superman Celebration is like any small-town carnival party: a mix of great local foods and pro concession stands; traveling amusement park rides; amateur sports competitions; a parade or two; a group community yard sale; and things like that. But every small-town carnival party committee in America wishes it had a tourist attractor as heroic as the Super Museum.
The two of us have attended the Superman Celebration four times. This was our first group shot with their iconic statue. Photo by some fellow tourist with no concept of how centering works.
Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken a road trip to a different part of the United States and seen wonders, constructs, architecture, 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. My son tagged along from 2003 until 2013 when he ventured off to college. In later years those trips took the form of cross-country drives to other states, passing by odd roadside attractions to see historically significant locales, world-famous landmarks, and/or pretty natural scenery. For our first four trips, we were all about geek-centric gatherings.
Once upon a time in 2001, my best friend and I chose a summertime destination different from the conventions we’d attended the two previous years. At the southern tip of Illinois and across the Ohio River from Paducah, KY, the small town of Metropolis devotes the second weekend of every June to their world-famous Superman Celebration. More than just a carnival acknowledging their local heritage and history, the Celebration invites tourists from all walks to come join in their festivities, as well as actors from various Superman movies, TV shows, and other related Super-works who come in for autographs and Q&As.
The 37th annual Celebration is coming up this weekend, June 11-14, 2015. We regret we’ll be missing this one due to other commitments, but in honor of that special occasion, we dug through our scrapbooks and photo albums to unearth our 35mm souvenirs of the very first time we visited the self-styled real-world hometown of the Man of Steel.
Right this way for classic shots of Superman’s kind of town!
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 