Six Saturdays a Week: Articles

 There is an event that many of you retired folks like me may be interested in checking out. It is called “The Endless Yard Sale.” It is a series of yard sales on a four day weekend in August (6^th thru 9^th 2009) on a 654 mile long stretch of highway 127 in the middle of the United States. This stretch of highway 127, also known as the 127 Corridor Sale, runs through 5 states Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. It runs from West Unity, Ohio to Gadsden, Alabama. 

Imagine 5,000-yard sales in a row that the people having them have accumulated items for an entire year to sell in this four-day period. A sound somewhat interesting does not it. You might find everything from antiques to live animals, rare coins to antique jewelry, civil war relics to Star Wars collectibles and anything else you can imagine. This is known as “the World’s Longest Yard Sale” This event has been going on for years and is so popular it is even featured each year on HGTV. Who knows you may even end up on TV showing the audience your great buy. Hundreds of thousands of people attend this event each year looking for that unique rare bargain. 

This event is so huge you will have to pick out a stretch of highway that you can work over a four-day period and explore the possibilities. Plan because lodging might be sort of a problem. If you do not mind a fifty-mile commute, there are several big cities with plenty of lodging along the way. My wife and I are planning to attend this sale this year. We have known about it for about five years but have never attended (it seems that something else always pops up) I hope we make it this year.

The concept of the World’s Longest Yard Sale in August is to pull people off the interstates and back into the heartland of rural, scenic America. The event encourages businesses and residents to participate by having yard sales, sidewalk sales, and special promotions for a continuous stretch from one end of the sale route to the other. Once established, the result is lots of fun for vendors and shoppers alike. We have all heard the saying “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.” That adage holds true as this event brings people together from all across the country and from around the world to barter and haggle over things that may have been stored in a garage or an attic somewhere for years. The pleasure we derive from rummaging through someone’s junk, hoping to find something unique and maybe even to stumble across an item worth a lot to you but the seller says, “I’ll take .50 cents for that.” What joy! Oh, and you get to meet some neat people by the way. We hope you take the time to travel the yard sale route. You will be glad you did. Discover the wonders YOUR America has to offer.

Carl Wheeler

Tags: Yard Sale

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.