Corydon’s own Butt Drugs is easy to get to, if you do as we did and park in the rear.
Every Indiana town above a certain size has large corporations trying to muscle in on their homegrown businesses and industries. Corydon has CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart servicing anyone’s prescription needs, same as we do here in the big city. Their residents have one convenient pill-vending option we don’t: anytime they want, they can go hit Butt Drugs.
A toy army prepared to march the streets of downtown Columbus.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Each year when there isn’t a pandemic fully raging, my wife Anne and I love attending entertainment and comic conventions throughout the Midwest and occasionally a bit beyond. We’re fascinated by the spectacle of each and every in-person nexus of geek cultures that presents a confluence of comics, artists, cosplayers, hobby artifacts, rare collectibles, IP-inspired handicrafts, talented performers and celebrity guests with fandom connections of varying levels of dedication and/or awesomeness.
This past weekend’s inaugural GalaxyCon Columbus (the one in Ohio) set out more than enough bait within reasonable road-trip range that the two of us were lured out of the house once more after previous 2022 outings to Star Trek: Mission Chicago, Indiana Comic Con, and Fan Expo Chicago. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.
We’ve already shared all our stories from the Convention Center grounds apart from a few photo outtakes, but we’d be remiss to neglect the fun times we had in and around the neighborhood. Our third stop in town this year was at least as stimulating as the first two. Longtime MCC readers will recall when we used to find ourselves at Chicago cons a few times every year, up until the pandemic ruined everything for a while. This year Columbus has gone above and beyond in catching our straying eyes and luring us eastward instead of northward.
Our view of the Green Mountains from the parking lot at our next hotel in Waterbury.
Natural panoramas! American war history! Pandemic-era disappointment! Food! This one has ’em all, in sparing amounts!
The Old State Capitol in the old state capital on good ol’ Capitol Avenue. Capital!
Back in 2016 Anne and I visited the Indiana State House on the occasion of our state bicentennial and enjoyed the up-close look at where our local government met and worked in easier times before work-from-home became a survival option and later became simply the latest fashion. Before our centrally situated hometown of Indianapolis became the official workplace of the governor and all the rest, Hoosiers reported to the State House’s prequel structure near our southern border.
A 2010 statue of Vermont jazz legend Big Joe Burrell, who played with the likes of B.B. King, Count Basie, and Phish.
We’re not high-end shoppers who get caught anywhere near boutiques, jewelers, perfumeries, fashion trendsetters, or home decor artisans unless they happen to be next door to the retailers we’d rather visit. And by “we” I especially mean “I”. Anne’s collecting habits are modest bordering on spartan, whereas I’m the one on the lookout for brick-and-mortar purveyors who cater to my hobbies and pop culture interests. Fortunately Burlington had just the district for us.
Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beeeeee best if I just stop there.
Autumn motifs are inevitable in Anne’s October birthday trips. Ironically, Anne isn’t even a huge Halloween fan (she saves her holiday love for December), but on our walk to go check out one of Corydon’s proudest monuments, we noticed the number of residents who’d decorated for the occasion well outnumbered the few pitiful celebrants on our own street back home. I admittedly took my sweet time setting up our own display this year, but at least we have one. It was nice to find the spirit of the occasion hasn’t been exorcised from all neighborhoods.
A glass pumpkin for the autumn occasion at Zimmerman Art Glass in Corydon.
Okay, prologue aside, now we get to October 14th’s primary objective.
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 respective birthdays together 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. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.
In October 2022 Anne turned 52. Indiana offers no shortage of tourist attractions for history aficionados like her. We’ve visited quite a few of those over the years, but this year we felt it was time to check off one of the Hoosier State’s biggest trivia answers: Corydon, our original state capital before Indianapolis…
Live from Indiana, it’s TV’s Kate Mulgrew!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last May my wife Anne and I stopped in Bloomington, home of Indiana University, to check out the bronze statue of STEM icon Captain Kathryn Janeway that was unveiled in October 2020 as a tribute to Kate Mulgrew, the celebrated star of Star Trek: Voyager. As it happens, Voyager writer/producer Jeri Taylor, a Bloomington native herself, inserted her hometown into Janeway’s canonical backstory. The city’s fans took that nod to heart and commissioned the artistic tribute accordingly in her future birthplace. It was a kick for us to admire the results in person.
As if that weren’t enough Mulgrew awesomeness for us this year, we also met her in person at Star Trek: Mission Chicago back in April, attended her rather lively Q&A at same, and read her two candid, riveting memoirs. I could go on with links to our other Trek-related experiences of late, but suffice it to say we can’t seem to stop tripping over Trek lately.
But wait! There’s more!
Anne meets Champy, the local celebrity mythical water monster.
By the time we reached Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, we’d seen Lake Champlain from a mountaintop, from the roadside, and from a small pier jutting into the middle of it. At lunchtime on Day Four, we were okay with seeing it yet again, but tried slowing down long enough to traipse around it and bask for a while.
What has two thumbs and buys winter wear in summertime? This gal!
Bears. Memes. Bernie-Starred Mitten-ica.
Hurray for sugar and sugary products!
“Did you buy any maple syrup while you were there?” asked far too many people whenever we mentioned our trip to Vermont. So…yes. Yes, we did. WE HOPE YOU’RE ALL HAPPY.
I mean, we do hope you are. Sorry if it sounded sarcastic.
Lake Champlain once again, but up close this time.,
Our next stop appealed to us on two levels: we thought it would offer easy access to something we wanted to see; and admission was free. Fans of boats and boat accessories might’ve gotten more out of it than we did, but when it’s free, we’re willing to live and learn a little.
Some ’80s kids saw the front of this place on TV, though the owners have had new windows installed since then.
Vermont! At last! Naturally our first stop was a pop culture reference from our childhoods.
As elevated views go, it isn’t Pike’s Peak, but it’s not nothing.
Fun travel rule of thumb: if someone asks if you’d like to go up a really tall structure or geological feature so you can look down upon all the other tourist attractions you actually came to see, you say yes.
Welcome to Fort Ticonderoga, which rhymes with hardly anything except “yoga” and “Conestoga”.
Some of the roadside attractions that catch our attention are all about indulging our geek sides. Some are highlights that speak to Anne the history aficionado. For such a tiny town, Ticonderoga pulled off the neat trick of catering to both facets in her. It was a little jarring transitioning from a tour of the 23rd century to a time capsule of the 18th, but we managed. We are large; we contain multitudes.
Captain Anne has the bridge.
Sure, Vermont was our target destination, but the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour might’ve been the stop on our itinerary that we were most excited to see. The town of Ticonderoga seemed an odd location choice, as opposed to a large city or squarely in California, land of ten thousand entertainment tourist attractions. But inside those doors and on those resurrected sets, all questions about the outside become irrelevant while you’re exploring this full-scale, familiar TV world.
Of course we couldn’t contain all that space goodness to a single chapter.
Scotty, two to beam down!
MCC’s amazing colossal Star Trek year continues! So far in 2022 we’ve attended Star Trek: Mission Chicago (where we met cast members from multiple series) as well as two other conventions with Trek stars (another Chicago show, plus one here in Indy); we’ve shared and overshared our impressions of Picard; loved both Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds without writing about them; read a few Trek-related books, some of which I’ve discussed as well as others I’ll eventually cover when I get back to writing about my reading; and checked out the Captain Janeway birthplace statue in Bloomington, IN. After taking several years off from the universe Gene Roddenberry built, we’ve fallen back into it hard.
We even worked a heaping helping of Trek into this year’s vacation. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve detoured for Trek’s sake (cf. that one time in 2014 when a traveling Trek exhibition stopped at the Mall of America), but some extra mileage was necessary to reach this one. One does not merely swerve off-road on an impulse for this particular spectacle.
Another day, another grave.
Upstate New York is populated by the remains of so many famous dead people that it’s tough for any serious history aficionado like Anne to pass all of them without at least a cursory courtesy visit. Hardcore fans of the Revolutionary War who want to complete their gravesite set will have to detour far into the sticks west of the Adirondacks to pay respects to one particular Prussian whose assistance was instrumental to securing America’s freedom from the British monarchy, at least in a bureaucratic sense if not necessarily in a head-space sense.
These treats were billed as Korean Breakfast Corn Dogs — dipped in Cinnamon Toast Crunch pancake batter, drizzled with a hot honey ‘n’ sweet cream sauce,
Not all the food we had on this trip need to be raised on their own commemorative pedestals, but Syracuse, NY, earned bonus points for providing us with not one, but two of the best meals of the week. That’s worth a single-entry shout-out.
Harriet Tubman. The lady. The leader. The legend.
After the National Women’s Rights Park we had another set of stops to make at the next town over that would likewise have fit in well with our 2018 visits to the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester and her grave (as well as Frederick Douglass’), if we’d had time to stop at every single upstate New York city on that trip. This year we made up for quite a few omissions that year.
But first, we had to brake for some unexpected cameos that had far less to do with rights, except perhaps in other galaxies.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 