2016 NYC Trip Photos #28: The Last Manhattan Mealtimes

Junior's pastry!

Mini-pastry appetizer at Junior’s, one of the better experiences from the second half of our week.

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…

On our vacations the meals trend in the same direction throughout our week: at first tentative while we’re exploring new territory. After a day or two we’re emboldened enough to experiment with places more imaginative or just more expensive. After peaking midweek with the greatest meals of the year, our dinners then begin to descend in either quality or excitement level as we reach the far end of our budget and tap into our last reserves of energy just to finish out the trip. We try to keep finding gems among the dross, whether the results impress our friends back home or not.

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2016 NYC Trip Photos #10: Waiting for Colbert

Late Show Marquee!

It’s not the same as his old Comedy Central gig, but it’ll do.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

For our second trip to Manhattan we decided to do something we’d never done before: attend the live taping of a late-night talk show. Tradition holds that such shows may air in the wee hours of bedtime, but they’re recorded before a live studio audience that day’s afternoon. Sadly for our chosen week, most hosts were either on hiatus or already sold out by the time I thought to look them up. I found a few TV shows that we could have attended, but none of us three had any remote interest in either Maury Povich or The View. Fortunately there was one man who’s airing new episodes this week, who had tickets available, and who wasn’t the complete opposite of us.

That man was Stephen Colbert. That show was The Late Show With Stephen Colbert starring Stephen Colbert. These are the results of that time we showed up to watch Stephen Colbert record the July 11th episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert starring Stephen Colbert.

At the end of our extra-length Day Three, I typed up the preceding entry into the wee hours of that night as quickly as I could while our Colbert experience was fresh in mind. For background noise I had our hotel TV turned on while the episode aired. Listening to a series of performances we’d just watched in person added a surreal edge to my exhausted state of mind.

Right this way for links to our episode, and photos of what else we did!

Ads of Darkness, Ads of Light

Suicide Squad!

Some movie posters want to sell you happy fun times using all the colors of the rainbow. In terrible times like these, not everyone wants to embrace the dark side. Sometimes even our creepiest antiheroes are redrawn to radiate with kaleidoscopic pop-art joy in hopes of convincing tourists and natives alike that our next trips to the theater will leave us smiling and cheering while murderers and other malcontents save the day. Apparently that’s why the Suicide Squad now stands tall above Times Square looking as far removed from murky Zack Snyder dystopia as possible.

Meanwhile in other universes, other antiheroes couldn’t care less whether you smile or shudder.

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New Jersey from a Minimum Safe Distance

One Anne!

I can see Springsteen from here!

Flying to this year’s vacation destination had its advantages — faster travel time; free tiny snacks; no road construction delays; no rental car to return afterward while we’re all exhausted; and no danger of accidentally winding up in Newark again on our way to Manhattan. Sure, they could’ve diverted our plane to the wrong airport, but thankfully that didn’t happen. We also reviewed the New Jersey hotel options that we took advantage of in 2011, but price variances in both states over the past five years leveled the playing field in our absence. So this faraway glimpse is as close as we got to New Jersey this year.

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Our View for Six Nights in Hell’s Kitchen

Hell's Kitchen!

Please enjoy this evening view from our NYC hotel where we’re staying for this year’s family vacation, on a one-lane street a few blocks southwest of Times Square, a few blocks north of the Port Authority, and inside the boundaries of Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood famous for having a Gordon Ramsey show named after it and for going down the tubes every time Matt Murdock is too busy recuperating from fatal wounds or being Elektra’s lapdog to come save the day. A coworker back in Indiana who once worked on Broadway for years recommended this hotel, and when we get home I have questions for him.

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Our 2011 Road Trip, Part 1: The Road to New York

Manhattan!

Witness our first photos of Manhattan taken during — and stitched together after — our 2010 road trip, from the ferry on our way from the New Jersey shore to Liberty Island. A separate road-trip series for another time.

[Welcome to the first installment of a very special miniseries, representing the original travelogue from our family’s 2011 vacation to fabulous New York City, by which we largely mean Manhattan because we ended up skipping our to-do lists for all the other boroughs. Additional stops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania may not be proper consolation for anyone who was hoping to hear our thoughts on Coney Island or the Bronx Zoo. We’re revisiting this now because we’re planning on revisiting NYC in July 2016, hopefully with a better eye toward the areas beyond the rivers.

Some hindsight editing and modern-day commentary will be included along the way as value-added bonus features for readers old and new alike. All photos were taken either with my first Canon PowerShot or with my ancient Kodak EasyShare that became my wife Anne’s hand-me-down device for the next few years. Very little about these entries will approach 1080p quality, but we’ll do what we can with the materials at hand. Despite the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 2015, my wife saved backups of all of our digital vacation photos to Shutterfly, and you have no idea how excited I am to report that, on this very night, I’ve figured out how to download decently sized file copies for free instead of resorting to frustratingly inadequate screen shots. Science marches on.

Enjoy!]

Right this way for Chapter One in a very special MCC series! (CAUTION: It’s just a prologue.)

The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #29: Outtakes, Colorado

Rocky Mountains!

Those amazing colossal Rocky Mountains up in Rocky Mountain National Park. Better or worse than the shots we shared before?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our second trip to Colorado in twenty-eight episodes — November 1-6, 2015, Sunday through Friday, which represented our very first experience with air travel. We didn’t lose any luggage, eat any airline meals, wait extra hours for a delayed flight, land early due to onboard nuisance, see any Muslims snap-judged, or throw up at any point. And between the flights there and back again, we saw lots more Colorado we hadn’t seen our first time around when we drove out there from Indianapolis in 2012.

Here, in our grand finale: a selection of outtakes from various chapters — a few skipped by dumb oversight; a few that captured isolated moments disconnected from the rest of the narrative; and a few left behind due to inadequate wow factor. We may be aging amateurs who don’t have thousands of unconditional superfans, but we do have light standards.

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The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #28: Farewell, Colorado

Southwest Wing!

Have wing, add prayer.

At last our six-day excursion to Colorado was drawing to close, with one last chance to wander Denver International Airport before our flight home to Indianapolis around 6 p.m. MST. We tried to make the most of it.

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The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #27: Clocking Out of Cloudy Colorado

Colorado Clouds!

At 3:00 p.m. Mountain Standard Time on Friday, November 6, 2015, my wife wrapped up the final shift of her Colorado Springs business trip, jumped in the rental car with me and sighed in relief. Her work week hadn’t been an easy one. The branch appreciated her assistance, but it was clear they needed more help than she could give them in her 40+ hours on the premises. She did her part, but what happened after she left was no longer her concern. At long last she was free. She could finally unwind and enjoy a little Colorado sightseeing before we ended our six-day experience.

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2015 Road Trip Photos #51: Season Finale, Last Call for Outtakes

Queen Anne!

Queen Anne dons her royal attire at Mardi Gras World. Photo by her humbled consort.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we guided you through our annual road trip in fifty episodes, driven July 11-17, 2015, from Indianapolis to Louisville to Birmingham to New Orleans to Biloxi to Mobile to Monroeville to Montgomery to Nashville to home again. Our previous outtake gallery gave you one last look at our Alabama explorations. Here, then, in our grand finale: outtakes from everywhere and everything else we saw, with an emphasis on New Orleans, the ostensible centerpiece of our vacation. A few were alternate versions of previously shared pics; a few were skipped by dumb oversight; and a few were left behind due to insufficient pizzazz.

Right this way for the season finale!

2015 Road Trip Photos #50: Outtakes, Alabama

USS Alabama!

My favorite shot of the top deck of the USS Alabama…starring some complete stranger who wandered in the way.

With each year’s travelogue we like to conclude with a second-chance review through the hundreds of photos we took to see which photos were unfairly cut from the final roster, which ones didn’t fit into the narrative but possess their own merit, and/or which ones slipped through the cracks for no valid reason. The twelve pics in this first of two outtake sets were all taken in Alabama, arguably the state where we spent the most time this week, racked up the most driving mileage, and learned the most about through historical immersion.

(As always, photos are clickable for enlargement and resolution and such.)

Right this way for eleven more honorable mentions!

The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #26: Mission in Manitou Springs

Manitou Springs!

One last time in the shadow of Pikes Peak.

The week was winding down before we knew it. Anne got off work so late on Thursday that we had time only for dinner and an all-new Sleepy Hollow before she faced one last earl bedtime and one last shift in Colorado Springs. Friday is usually a time for rejoicing in the work week’s end, but this one would prove bittersweet. We loved the mountains and the culinary forays, but we missed our home and our dog, and I’d crossed all the high-ranking attractions off my to-do list. The remaining options ranged in curiosity level from “maybe” to “meh”. Colorado Springs and the surrounding areas have a lot to see and do for a variety of interests and tourists. Not all of them were for me, but I tried to keep an open mind.

I spent the morning of Day Six as a lot of normal travelers might: I lounged around the hotel room for a few hours and did virtually nothing. I procrastinated the MCC Sleepy Hollow recap in favor of reading, relaxing, and catching reruns of Supernatural on TNT. I’d never watched a single episode before, and perhaps it was a bizarre choice to begin my viewership with the season-7 finale and the season-8 premiere, but that’s the beauty of vacation: you get to have fun and break some rules no matter what kind of looks people give you for it.

Eventually I snapped out of my lazy doldrums and came up with a plan. I checked out of the hotel, leaving behind ten of the twenty-four bottled waters that I’d picked up on my way to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and taking three with me for the road. Just as the previous guests had left us a fresh half-gallon of milk and a box of breakfast Hot Pockets that neither of us could bear to touch, so did we pay it forward to the next guests in our own way.

Then I launched myself on a side quest of sorts to cross a few items off Anne’s own to-do list. This wouldn’t just be a time-killer or selfish indulgence: it would be an act of service for someone I loved, frivolous though the targeted treasures might be.

And that’s how I wound up once again in Manitou Springs for my final close-ups of the Rocky Mountains.

Right this way for one last walkabout before heading home!

2015 Road Trip Photos #49: The Week in Cityscapes

NOLA via WWII!

The New Orleans business district skyline as viewed from the fourth floor of the National WWII Museum’s Boeing Center. At left, one of the exhibit halls; at right, the theater where we watched Beyond All Boundaries.

Throughout our drive from Indianapolis to New Orleans and back again, my wife took pics of each major metropolis as we passed through them. During our walks and our detours we found a few other neat vantage points that let us gaze upon these cities and wonder if the life bustling along their streets is that much different from our own. In most cases probably, but it was fun to contemplate.

Right this way for a few shots on the road and the sight that greeted us at home!

The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #25: Colorado Cookery II, or “Snacks and a Plane”

Airplane Restaurant!

Usually when an airplane is lodged halfway inside a building, it’s called a disaster. The Airplane Restaurant proves they can achieve peaceful symbiosis.

As with our July road trip to the South, I was determined to find places to eat in Colorado Springs that we didn’t have back home in Indianapolis. Here we backtrack a bit to recap a couple of culinary experiences we had in the margins between the last several chapters in this series. Not all of them were trendsetting, but two of them were more creative than anyplace I’ve seen in Indianapolis.

For one of those establishments, the creativity was in the structure itself. Pictured above is my lunch option for Day 5 — the Airplane Restaurant, a perfect companion to the National Museum of WWII Aviation down the street. This 13-year-old eatery is attached to a Radisson Hotel, housed partly inside a normal building, and partly inside a Boeing KC-97. Once a refueling tanker for other planes, now it refuels people.

Right this way for more about the Airplane, plus donuts!

2015 Road Trip Photos #48: Noontime in Nashville

Nashville State Capitol!

Twelve American state capitals have State Capitols without domes. Tennessee’s 1859 version is one of them.

When last we left Nashville, we’d stopped there for lunch on the first day of our 2005 road trip to San Antonio. We ate at our first Jack in the Box nearly a decade before they finally came to Indianapolis; we saw their version of the Parthenon, a World’s Fair tribute to their old nickname “the Athens of the South”; and then we moved on. Ten years later, we returned once again for lunch and spent slightly longer there this time than last time.

One last state capital before returning home to our own. One last Presidential burial site. One last sign of Confederacy fandom. One last pretty garden. One last Andrew Jackson statue. One last official Southern meal. Our midday stroll around downtown Nashville was like a symbolic highlight reel of our entire road trip.

Right this way for the final city walkabout of the series!

The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #23: War Relics II

Fuselage!

Some airplane restoration jobs take a tad more paint than others.

Visiting the National Museum of WWII Aviation without my wife was a bizarre experience. She’s the one who’s a WWII aficionado, the one who aced history classes left and right, the one with the PoliSci degree, and the one who doesn’t need a tour guide through museums like this. While she spent another Colorado Springs morning fulfilling the company business obligations that made this trip possible, I did the best I could to take photos and notes of what she was missing. Maybe she already knows it all, but if I could bring her just one new trivia tidbit, then this tourist’s mission was a success.

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2015 Road Trip Photos #47: The Dukes of Hazzard Confederate History Month Holiday Special

Dukes Memorabilia!

Back in the ’80s, this vintage merchandise used to make the perfect Christmas gifts, stocking stuffers, birthday presents, and Hannukah surprises.

We’d seen a lot of moving, emotionally charged sites throughout our trip through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana — remembrances of Hurricane Katrina, souvenirs from world wars, paths where civil rights protestors once marched, places where people were beaten or died senselessly, tributes to immigrants, signposts of American progress, and new sides to areas we knew only from their embarrassing stereotypes. It was a week we found at turns educational, sobering, revelatory, alarming, grievous, yet uplifting at a number of key points when recounting the victories against racism and oppression wherever we found them.

Meanwhile in Nashville, on July 17, 2015, exactly one month after the senseless tragedy at Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, y’all could still come on down to Cooter’s Place, take a gander through the Dukes of Hazzard Museum, and then head to the backroom and stock up on all the Confederate flag accessories you’ll ever need to celebrate all your favorite Confederate States of America holidays. If you plan ahead, you’ll be all set to celebrate April as Confederate History Month, which is a very real thing in several southern states. Yee-haw!

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The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #22: War Wings II

Douglas A-1 Skyraider Missiles!

The wing of a Douglas A-1 Skyraider housing presumably unarmed missiles.

Last July my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting the National World War II Museum in scenic New Orleans, Louisiana. Anne is the big, big WWII buff in the family, but I enjoyed myself well enough to devote four chapters to it in our nearly completed July 2015 road trip series (here, here, here, and especially here). Four months later, I was surprised to discover Colorado Springs has a place that’s the perfect sequel — the National Museum of WWII Aviation.

I previously posted about my Day Five visit later that evening from the hotel and used up most of my intro material in that one sitting. The single plane pictured in that entry, their F7F Tigercat, was hardly the only aircraft on the premises. The museum is 30% display cases and 70% actual war planes in various states of disrepair, restoration, and flight capability. Tonight’s presentation, then: another batch of World War II fighter planes to go with our July set.

Right this way for another lineup of America’s WWII airborne warcraft!

2015 Road Trip Photos #46: Presidential Flowers Are Prettiest

Hermitage Garden!

When we planned our visit to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage in Nashville, we expected American history, Presidential burial sites, preserved or simulated 19th-century living quarters, honest acknowledgment of slavery, and maybe a few war props. We didn’t expect so many pretty flowers.

Rachel Jackson’s sudden death in December 1828 mere weeks before her husband’s first inauguration means she was never officially a First Lady of the United States. Up to that point, one of her prize works was the one-acre garden on their estate, which remains in place to this day with many descendants of the original flora as living, blooming legacies. For longtime MCC readers familiar with our annual spring “Flowers Are Pretty” entries (follow the saga here, here, here, and here) may agree this walk around the Hermitage works well as a bonus chapter in that series.

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The Springs in Fall — 2015 Photos #21: Lithic Landscape Lollygagging

Palmer Park!

Day Five was the last full day of our week in Colorado Springs. I had a late-morning appointment that left me with an hour or so to waste after hotel breakfast #4. I scoped out my options on the east side of town and decided to hang out at Palmer Park, nothing I’d heard of before my vacation research. It’s a plot of land slightly smaller than Central Park, but encapsulating all the Rocky Mountain scenery I’d been exploring and driving around all week. The best part was, the petite peaks of Palmer Park were a picnic to perambulate.

Right this way for nature and scenery and panoramas and such!