Saling Across the South

Yard Saling that is.  I recently returned from another visit to the Yard Sale Across the South (otherwise known as the World's Longest Yard Sale or the Highway 127 sale).  It's held the first weekend of August every year.  The sale runs from Hudson, Michigan to Gadsden, Alabama, a total of 675 miles.  And we only made our way through 39 miles of it.  We, is me and my partner in crime when it comes to such treasure hunts, Kathy Schopp.  A high school friend with equal if not greater love of old things and found objects.  Don't you love that her last name is Schopp?  The 39 miles we covered over 3 days ran from Frankfort to Danville, Kentucky.

Our home base was the Hampton Inn in Frankfort.  We stayed there two nights on points collected through other Hilton stays and from a charge card that rewards with Hilton points.  We paid for the last night.  The sale officially starts on Thursday, although some vendors set up as early as Monday I'm told, and goes through Sunday, though you will find some vendors don't sell on Sunday, I assume because they have to travel and get back home to work on Monday.  We traveled on Thursday, with a stop in New Harmony, Indiana, which I'll have to tell you about another time, then shopped yard sales all day on Friday.  On Saturday, we shopped our way down to Harrodsburg and took a side trip to Pleasant Hill Shaker Village for their annual Arts & Crafts Festival and then hit a couple more yard sales on our way back to Frankfort for the evening.  It was back home on Sunday, but not before hitting a couple of our favorite spots one last time to see if we could find any deep discounts on the last day (we did) and then another quick stop back in New Harmony.  And I still made it home in time to visit "the moms" (my mother-in-law Mary and my mom, Wanda, both in nursing homes at this time, but more on that another time).

So, exactly what do you find at the World's Longest Yard Sale?  Well, you find residents having yard sales, neighbors and neighborhoods having yard sales, churches having rummage sales, convention centers having flea markets and anyone with a little bit of land setting up booths and renting them to vendors to sell their wares for a weekend.  And vendors come from all over the United States.  For that matter, the buyers come from all over too.  We spoke to a vendor who had visited with folks who had traveled from as far as California and Arizona to shop the sale.  I've been told that business owners from the West Coast fly out to the sale, rent a truck, fill it with finds and drive it back to stock their shops.  This year was my fourth visit to the sale.  Frankfort is the closest point on the sale to my house, straight down I-64 so that's where I've shopped all but one year.  Once we started down in Crossville, Tennessee and worked our way back up to Frankfort.  But for the extra drive time I wouldn't really say we found any better sales, although we did travel through some beautiful countryside and ran into the folks from HGTV shooting a special on the yard sale.

So, what treasures did I come home with?  Well, I can tell you I didn't spend over $15 for any one item.  Check out the photos of some of my finds.  My favorite finds were a vintage pillow made out of yo-yos on both sides of the pillow (marked $15 but she sold it to me for $5) and a vintage wooden sign that says "We're the Best in Town" (for $15).  The pillow is on my daybeds in the sunroom of our cabin (along with a zillion more) and the sign went to the cabin too but I haven't found "its place" yet.  I also picked up a vintage Crayola tin for a friend ($5, originally marked $32),

a floral tole painted tray (for $5), a vintage green McCoy planter for $10, a sweet bracelet made out of an English coin and old silverware ($15), a crock container (marked $10 but sold to me the last day for $3), a vintage wooden deck chair for $7, two small vintage oil paintings (the pair for $18 but they were marked $25 for the pair) and an old cast iron fireplace front ($10) that I plan to use as "yard art" at our cabin.  Other purchases included a small vintage pottery vase ($4), a cobalt blue planter ($1), a street number sign for our cabin ($10), a vintage white enamel colander ($10) and a deer tray ($3).