Tag Archives: tourism

Super Bowl XLVI Indianapolis Memories, Part 2 of 3: (Some of) the 46 for XLVI Murals

February 6, 2022 By in Indiana, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
PAmela Bliss, My Affair with Kurt Vonnegut.

“My Affair with Kurt Vonnegut” by Pam Bliss, one of the city’s fan-favorite murals, stands along trendy Massachusetts Ave.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Once upon a time, and exactly once, Indianapolis hosted a Super Bowl. Back in 2012 our li’l city earned its first chance to host the big game. Thanks to tremendous teamwork among numerous organization and bodies cooperating under Mayor Greg Ballard, the Circle City welcomed untold thousands of visitors for a super-sized weekend of football mania, Hoosier tourism, and limited-time-only activities that welcomed all brought our downtown alive. It was a unique occasion that everyone in town could appreciate, including those of us who aren’t into sports, have never watched an entire football game — nary a Super Bowl, not even for the ads — and have never been invited to a Super Bowl party. We found ways to get into the spirit of the proceedings anyway.

All of this happened three months before Midlife Crisis Crossover launched. At the time I simply shared pics and stories with online friends, then reused a tiny selection of that material here on MCC one year later. I can’t remember why I was so stingy and only reposted eleven photos from among the dozens of relevant ones, including an entire quest involving citywide art. This past week our local media outlets have been holding their tenth-anniversary celebrations of that time we all did a Super Bowl together. That means it’s the perfect time for a remastered version of the tale of how we spent January 27-28, 2012, the weekend before Super Bowl 46…this time in trilogy form!

Regarding the aforementioned art quest:

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Our 2021 Road Trip #36: Kaiju Americana Trilogy

February 1, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jamestown giant buffalo!

If all real buffaloes had been this size, the history of the American frontier would’ve gone very differently.

One of the all-time greatest songs about road trips is an album track by “Weird Al” Yankovic called “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota“. It wasn’t one of his classic pop-single parodies, just a wacky 7-minute riff on ’70s lite-country crooners that aptly captured the essence of roadside attractions in all their abnormal Americana glory. Over the past twenty years we’ve seen our share of eccentricity and ingenuity on the run, but in one respect we’ve found the reality comes up a bit short: there are not garish, campy, world-record-setting colossi standing in all fifty states. We’ve seen a lot of “big”, but not much “biggest”.

Clearly we should’ve driven more deeply into North Dakota sooner. A 131-mile stretch of I-94 through the heart of their unassuming state skirts past no less than three such mega-animals in three different towns. Sure, their national park was pretty and a few statues of historical figures were fine, but they shriveled in comparison to the frivolous joy of this towering trio, none of whom have ever been invited to star in their own Syfy Original Film.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #35: North Dakota Statue Stopover Trilogy

January 28, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Young Theodore Roosevelt statue, Dickinson, North Dakota.

Taken together with other Presidential statues in this series, we see the Young Teddy/Old Teddy gap is nowhere near as wide as the one between Young and Old Elvis.

Tired of endlessly pretty panoramas from the Western U.S.? You say we should get back to some roadside art? Have we got some chapters for you!

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Our 2021 Road Trip #34: The Rough Rider’s Roofless Rumpus Room

January 24, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Boicourt Overlook!

When you’re still enjoying the scenery after seven days but verging on Badlands burnout.

The best advance investment we made for the sake of this vacation was an America the Beautiful Parks Pass. For one flat fee that felt exorbitant at first, pass-holders get one-year admission to any and all the national parks, monuments, and other qualifying attractions within your reach before time’s up. Anne did the math and realized our itinerary would indeed pay for itself if everything worked out and none of our destinations shut down.

The pass got us into Yellowstone National Park, our primary objective. It got us into Pompeys Pillar National Monument, which was on our return route. The next day, it gave us the clout to check out a third locale of natural splendor in North Dakota that exceeded the pass price and began netting us some savings. Any more national parks/monuments/whatever that we visit between now and June 2022 are basically free. We should probably take advantage of that. If the pandemic would shoo, that’d really help us out. Or if someone could open another national park conveniently here in Indiana, even better.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #33: Valley of Gold, Valley of Shadow

January 16, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne and Makoshika!

Anne in happier times, by which I mean ten minutes into the walk, taken at her request for her Facebook friends back home.

When recounting our disappointments about Yellowstone National Park, at the time two occurred to us: we wished everyone else in the world had stayed home so that we could’ve had the entire park to ourselves; and we wished we could’ve hiked more. We spent so many hours driving from one site to the next that we really didn’t walk a lot of long distances. We knew some exercise would do us a world of good, and yet its hiking trails — which we were pretty sure they had — didn’t stand out to us on their official, main map. It was all about dots of interest, not lines for walking.

Our next stop in Montana satisfied our urge to walk, then exceeded said urge until it began to pose safety concerns. As darkness overtook us at the close of Day Six, we stopped any and all jokes about “getting our steps in” for the rest of the trip.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #32: A Celebrity Signing in Sandstone

January 7, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
William Clark's autograph!

An autograph so rare, it takes an entire national park to serve as its Certificate of Authenticity.

Chasing autographs is usually an activity better suited to our comic cons than to our vacations. This time we had an excuse to peruse one along our path through Montana. We weren’t allowed to take it home, and its signer was unavailable for a jazz-hands photo op with us, but we appreciated the chance for a close look at preserved physical evidence from a real historical figure who’d later go on to costar in a long-running comics series. The giant object containing his personal graffiti was pretty keen, too.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #31: The Montana Montage

January 2, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
I-90 and mesa!

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…

Prior to 2021 I’d been to 32 of our United States. Plenty of Americans have walked around more states than I have, which is pretty cool for them. Our last six annual road trips took us to new places we hadn’t seen before, but they were all in states we’d already visited in the past. This year we finally crossed another state off the to-do list as we exited Yellowstone into the southwest end of Montana. Pound for pound Wyoming was prettier overall, but the Montana scenery had its charms.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #30: Restaurants Rundown

December 28, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Pokey's kangaroo dinner!

Lunch on Day Four at Pokey’s BBQ: a dinner of grilled kangaroo (“Just the ugly ones,” swears the menu) and spicy corn nuggets.

Longtime MCC readers may recall our best annual travelogues usually include photos from the restaurants we’ve visited in other states and the foodstuffs we’ve found that we don’t necessarily have back home in Indianapolis. We do enjoy sharing those moments, but you may have noticed their conspicuous absence from this series so far. We had looked forward to leaving home and hopefully leaving the year’s troubles behind for just ten days. The more we drove, the more we had to face reality: it was the same kind of 2021 everywhere in America.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #29: Goodbye Yellowstone Road

December 12, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Mammoth Hot Springs Upper Terrace Yellowstone!

The view of Mount Everts from Mammoth Hot Springs.

It all comes down to this, our final hour in Yellowstone. Nine hours after leaving Cody 180 miles ago, I was so done with driving. The entire day had confirmed our hypothesis that, yes, Yellowstone is big. Like, really really really really really big. I tried my best to care deeply about the remaining flora, fauna, geological peculiarities, and man-made obtrusions that stood between us and the park’s north entrance, which in turn would lead to respite at the next hotel and check a new state off our lifetime to-do list.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #28: From Sheepeater Cliff to Mount Everts

December 11, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Yellowstone Huckleberry Ridge Tuff road!

The frequently photographed portion of Grand Loop Road as it vertiginously curves around Huckleberry Ridge Tuff before heading down into Golden Gate Canyon.

The Grand Loop Road around Yellowstone kept going and going and going, and so did we…

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Our 2021 Road Trip #27: From Gibbon Falls to Willow Park

December 10, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Gibbon Falls, Yellowstone!

At a mere 84 feet high, Gibbon Falls isn’t the tallest waterfall we’ve seen, but it’s perfectly pretty as-is.

After we finally parted ways with the Grand Prismatic Spring, our next few hours in Yellowstone were a blur of frequent stops and pervasive wonders. Each point of interest had its highlights, but few of them have enough photos to merit their own individual, full-length galleries. Honestly, after so many hours on the road in those surroundings, I was in danger of scenic overload.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #25: Burning Biscuit Basin

November 28, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Yellowstone's Biscuit Basin!

The heated ponds of Yellowstone: nature’s original steam engine.

Sure, Old Faithful was spiffy, but every ounce of its spewed hot water was the same ordinary color. Elsewhere in Yellowstone, organic and inorganic additives commingle in the waters to produce scintillating effects in multiple colors of the rainbow. Maybe not all of them, but quite a few. I wouldn’t have minded some purple, but the land wasn’t taking requests.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #24: Old Faithful!

November 21, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Old Faithful geyser!

Geysers gonna gize.

It all leads up to this: our opportunity to witness the world’s most famous geyser do its thing. Old Faithful is the main event for any newcomer to Yellowstone National Park, the one feature everyone’s heard of since youth. It’s the center of the public’s average mental image of Yellowstone as just a giant, grassy plain with the one big natural water fountain in the middle. Its popularity and its predictably sporadic yet potentially time-killing nature (depending on how soon we’d arrive before the next show) made it the highest priority to check off our to-do list above all else.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #23: Follow the Yellowstone Road

November 19, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Yellowstone National Park sign!

One of the park’s less natural formations.

Day Five. 8:45 a.m. MDT. Primary objective reached. FINALLY.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #22: Prelude to Yellowstone

November 16, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Yellowstone traffic!

National parks: the hot spot of 2021!

Yes, I realize we took a lot of chapters to reach our feature presentation. If you thought waiting on the photos was taxing, try driving there. Stopping for fun along the way is how we roll.

Fair warning, though: still no Yellowstone in this chapter. Soon, though. We’re so close! That’s next, in fact! But first, a quick warm-up.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #21: Camp Cliffs Notes

November 9, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Wyoming stone pictographs!

Pictographs carved by earlier cultures, ideas and stories scrawled across every surface until they were all canceled and replaced by Snuffy Smith.

Our planned route deep into the heart of Wyoming required us to divert in the wrong direction away from Yellowstone and had nearly zero good options for pit stops along the way, save one (1) lone gas station outside Hyattsville with a tiny parking lot and too many cars already muscled into it. We swung off the highway and pressed northeast toward promises of archaeological revelations, embellished outcroppings, and closeness to nature. By the time we arrived at our next stop, we were happy just to have bathrooms again.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #20: The Wyoming Way

November 5, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Wyoming landscape.

Mountains! Forests! Mountains with forests on them! We were definitely not in Indiana anymore.

From the ancient buffalo graveyard it was a four-hour haul to our next attraction deep in the heart of the Cowboy State. It wasn’t long before we zoomed past the exit to Devil’s Tower, passed the longitudinal coordinates for Woodland Park, CO, and would officially drive The Farthest West We’ve Ever Gone in Our Lives.

(Anyone who’s ever seen the Pacific Ocean or had use for a frequent-flyer program is free to be unimpressed. We humble bumpkins claim our little personal victories wherever we can.)

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Our 2021 Road Trip #19: Oh, Give Me a Dump Where the Buffalo Jump

November 3, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
rafter buffalo!

Officially the highest buffalo statue we saw on this trip. Eventually we’d see a real one at a higher elevation, but for now this would have to do.

Our next stop promised a giant pit filled with centuries of accumulated fossils jammed into one cramped space. In my mind we were about see a Sarlacc but with thousands of jutting bones instead of spiky teeth. My preconceptions may have been unfairly fanciful.

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Our 2021 Road Trip #18: More American Presidents Cornered

November 1, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Bill Clinton statue!

Something about a Bill Clinton statue in front of a pawn shop feels just right.

Our previous photo gallery featured statues bearing likenesses of twenty Presidents of the United States of America, highlights from the City of Presidents art-walk around downtown Rapid City, South Dakota. Now we present the rest of them because YOU, the viewers, demanded it!

Wait, no, you didn’t. But I don’t feel like relegating 43 American Presidents to the outtake pile, and Anne co-wrote a joke I really want to see in print. So here we go again!

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Our 2021 Road Trip #17: A President on Every Corner

October 28, 2021 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
GWBush statue!

George W. Bush and Barney, his Scottish Terrier, making a living as traveling restaurant critics.

Longtime MCC fans have seen photos of more U.S. President statues in these pages than the average citizen will ever see in their entire lifetime. When your wife is a big history aficionado and the two of you share an inclination toward roadside attractions, Presidential art is an inevitable objective in all your vacation itineraries. But prior to 2021 we’d only seen statues commemorating a handful of Presidents — mostly the popular ones, plus a handful of lower-tier Commanders-in-Chief whose museums, preserved homes, gravesites, and peculiar fan bases we’ve visited. One American city was bold enough to ask: why not bring all of them to life?

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