The Lincoln Birthday Weekend, Part 7: His Presidential Library & Museum

Statues of the Lincoln family (Abraham, Mary and their three sons) in front of an indoor replica of the White House facade. Anne stands between two of the boys, doing jazz hands.

If you liked Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy or Archie Meets the Punisher, you’ll love “Anne meets the Lincoln family”! This fall on C-SPAN 3!

How do you do, fellow olds! Here on Election Day Eve 2024, do you feel the despairing urge to retreat from the present-day reality’s endless shenanigans into not-too-distant days of yore, when Presidential candidates with far more character endured and even persevered through much worse times in American history? Have we got the escape hatch for you!

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 on some new experience. On past trips we’d visited the graves, tombs, mausoleums and virtual posthumous palaces of 24 American Presidents in varying accommodations and budgets. One of the biggest names ever to grace the White House kept eluding us: Abraham Lincoln, planted a mere three hours away in Springfield, Illinois. In May 2023 I figured: let’s make his tomb a trip headliner of its very own, not a warm-up act on the road to Branson or whatever. History is technically more Anne’s fervent interest than mine, but we found plenty to do beyond reading wordy educational placards…

…which are even cooler when they’re paired with statues in action! We got all that and more when we departed the Illinois State Museum for our next stop, the much larger Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. This huge edifice was opened in 2005 and contains the Lincoln Presidential Library and other research collections, in addition to a series of statues reenacting various moments in the sixteenth President’s life. The statues were sadly not animatronic, but that didn’t seem to bother the few dozen field-tripping students we had to wade through on our way in. A selection of relics were found here and there around the life-sized exhibits.

Continue reading

The Lincoln Birthday Weekend, Part 1: The Tomb of Honest Abe

Indoor brown rectangular monument shaped like a tall sarcophagus. Inscribed on the front: "Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865". State flags line the curved yellow wall behind it, plus the quote "Now he belongs to the ages."

President #16, Abraham Lincoln, d.4/15/1865, age 56.

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 on some new experience. Sometimes there’ll be a convention or special event fortuitously scheduled for the occasion; other times, we’ll take a short road trip somewhere we haven’t been before. The time spent together is the best birthday gift, every May for me and every October for her. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

I’d rather not relive how we spent my birthday this year, but I’m more than happy to leap-frog past it to May 2023 and recount a much cheerier experience. Perhaps “cheerier” is the wrong word considering our first stop was a cemetery.

Continue reading

Indiana State Fair 2024 Photos, Part 4: Land of the Glowing Giants

Side view of a T-Rex lying down with its mouth open and its tail sticking straight out horizontally.

Flee from the mighty T-Rex that gapes to all comers with its muscular jaws! Or relax at the table and chairs under its butt.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

As if Artscape and the chainsaw sculptures weren’t enough art: on the north end of the fairgrounds, the relatively new space known as The Backyard — which in 2023 was covered in basketball courts and dubbed Hoopfest — hosted an exhibit called Illuminate, comprising a collection of giant-sized organisms that look impressive in daylight but are actually huge lanterns activated at night. Online sources allege this is its second annual occurrence, except the previous works were Asian-themed and those same sources swear they were stationed in Expo Hall. Considering our 2023 visit to Expo Hall turned up only caged critters, I’d be curious to know the building’s exhibition timeline. It sucks to discover just now that we missed something cool.

Not this year, though. Behold: Illuminate! In daylight! I haven’t been to the State Fair at night in 23 years, and there’s no way we’d’ve had enough energy to stay awake and mobile from opening to closing time, so please enjoy some giant unlit lanterns in sunshine! With neon paint that’s, like, a kind of glowing!

Continue reading

Our 2022 Road Trip #28: Utica’s Golden

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.

Continue reading

Captain Janeway’s Homecoming: Star Trek Fans Welcome Kate Mulgrew to Bloomington

Mulgrew and Janeway statue!

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!

Continue reading

Our 2022 Road Trip #7: Harriet Tubman vs. the Empire

Harriet Tubman statue!

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.

Continue reading

Our 2022 Road Trip #6: Women’s Rights the Day After Dobbs

Womens Rights National Park Visitor Center statues!

How many suffragette statues can you name?

Of all the weekends on all the calendars that we could’ve picked to visit a tribute to women…

Continue reading

Our 2022 Road Trip #2: A Night Off for Steel City Sports

Willie Stargell statue!

Ladies and gentlemen, Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer Willie Stargell!

Longtime MCC readers are well aware we’re not into sports. We don’t actively hate them, but they’re not among our hobbies and we only attend games if we’re handed free tickets. Sports-related tourism pops up on rare occasions in our trips — like that time we loitered around Camden Yards back in 2017 — but we don’t go out of our way for it. When it’s directly in our path and we have the free time…eh, why not take a gander.

Continue reading

The Fantabulous 50s Weekend, Part 5: Schiller Park Intermezzo

Kedziora Suspension!

One of five statues (out of an original total of 23) from Jerzy Jotka Kedziora’s series “Suspension: Balancing Art, Nature and Culture”.

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.

I’ve just now lived to see 50, and after weeks of research and indecision, we planned an overnight journey to the next state over, to the capital city of Columbus, Ohio, which had cool stuff that this now-fiftysomething geek wanted to see. Columbus, then, would be the setting for our first outing together as quintagenarians…

From the Center of Science and Industry we took a short hop south to German Village, a historic neighborhood with quite a few small businesses clustered within. We did some shopping (more about that in a later entry) and some eating (ditto, but different later entry), but in between stops we decided to exercise our middle-aged-couple privilege to call time-out on all the jaunting and go enjoy some peace and quiet at the nearest park. Its grounds had a few modestly nifty sights to catch, so it wasn’t just us starting at grass and trying to remember the Good Old Days.

Continue reading

Our 2021 Road Trip #43: Black Hawk Up

Black Hawk more zoom!

There he stood up, across, along, on, by, at, above and beyond the river. Not pictured: the river.

One last state. One last stop. One last attraction. One last park. One last forest. One last cliff. One last statue. All the plurals throughout this series come down to these.

Continue reading