The red stairs of Duffy Square: where all the cool vacationers come to sit down and appear in the backgrounds of everyone else’s photos.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Every year from 1999 to 2015 my wife Anne and I took a road trip to a different part of the United States and visited attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. With my son’s senior year in college imminent and next summer likely to be one of major upheaval for him (Lord willing), the summer of 2016 seemed like a good time to get the old trio back together again for one last family vacation before he heads off into adulthood and forgets we’re still here. In honor of one of our all-time favorite vacations to date, we scheduled our long-awaited return to New York City…

Returning to Times Square was inevitable, and not just because our hotel was a few blocks away. All those colossal neon ad campaigns attract tourists like we’re wingless moths, but instead of electrocuting us, they hope to implant latent signals that will one day activate on a time delay and zap our mental processing centers till we agree to empty our wallets and purses in the general direction of the products, goods, or services that previously loomed above us and dominate our vacation slideshows.

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