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Tag Archives: vacation

Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 52: The Season Finale Outtakes

February 4, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Naked and Starving Arch!

DAY SIX: The other side of the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge. The complete George Washington quote at the top reads, “Naked and starving as they are / We cannot enough admire / The incomparable Patience and Fidelity / of the Soldiery”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our seven-day trip through Ohio, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania in fifty episodes —- July 7-13, 2018. It all comes down to this, per our tradition for every MCC road trip maxiseries: one final collection of alternate scenes, extra details, and surplus attractions along the way that were squeezed out of the main narrative. Enjoy!

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 51: The Museum of Museum Outtakes

February 2, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Purple Electric Chair!

Purple electric chair from the Heinz History Museum. We failed to note its significance, but that color scheme cries out for more accessories.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our seven-day trip through Ohio, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania in fifty episodes —- July 7-13, 2018, with stops along the way at nine museums or museum-like historical structures. Here in our penultimate chapter we present a selection of additional exhibits from those museums. Their fascinating exhibits could’ve kept us going for several more chapters albeit with increasingly diminishing returns. I tried to be choosy when curating the previous chapters, so the following gallery represents the honorable mentions, some of which were perhaps unfairly cut. Enjoy!

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 50: The Last Roads Home

January 29, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
country fried steak!

We know it’s time to go home when we start craving good ol’ home cookin’ or corporate simulations of it,

The last day. The final hours. The way home.

Pittsburgh to Indianapolis is a six-hour drive. Two detours for Presidential burial sites in Ohio made six feel like twenty.

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 49: The Last Dead President

January 26, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Warren and Florence Harding!

President #29: Warren G. Harding, d. 8/2/1923, age 57.

Our Presidential body count so far on this vacation:

  1. Rutherford B. Hayes, in the verdant park behind his lavish museum in Fremont, OH
  2. Millard Fillmore, in the same well-kept Buffalo cemetery as several Famous Names in Black History
  3. Chester Arthur, in a dusty corner plot in Albany
  4. Martin Van Buren, in an ancient burial ground a mile from his Dutch home church in Kinderhook, NY
  5. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the grounds of Hyde Park
  6. Grover Cleveland, alongside his fellow presidents of Princeton University
  7. James Buchanan, alone on a hill in Lancaster, PA
  8. William McKinley, under a seven-story dome in Canton, OH

…and now, two hours from the William McKinley Memorial and 3½ hours from home, we wended our way through a maze of lazy country highways and one construction detour to reach the final American President on our week-long tour. We had not saved the best for last.

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 48: One Last Museum Before Home

January 22, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
animatronic mckinleys!

No, animatronic William and Ida McKinley think YOU’RE the creepy one.

Seven days, nine museums. I’ve been counting Presidential burial sites from the beginning, but I hadn’t done the math on how many museums or museum-esque structures we visited on this trip till just now. In all that’s counting:

…and the subject of our next chapter. It wasn’t a primary objective, but it was next door to one, and we had a little money left in the budget for their ticket prices. We figured why not add one more to the roster.

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Our 2018 Road Trip, Part 47: The Climb to McKinley

January 19, 2019 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
McKinleys with wreaths!

You can tell our next President has a bigger fan base than some of the others in this series — far more wreaths, and his final resting place is indoors.

I realize these chapters have been rather spaced apart and there’ve been so many of them, but we’re technically in the home stretch now. After a quick lunch stop in West Virginia, only one state stood between us and home. We’d already paid respects to one American President from Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes, back on Day One. Two more Presidential gravesites lay ahead on the trail before we would cross the final state border.

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