Went on a treasure hunt!

A few weeks ago, Gene and I went to Topeka for the weekend.

Yes, that's terribly exciting isn't it? LOL

We had a groupon for a hotel in Topeka, and one of our friends was celebrating his 50th birthday (surprise party!!) so we combined the 2 things together, threw in some antiquing and made a weekend of it all.

In the process of antiquing, we ran across an odd little shop with no price tags run by a little old man. He was quite a character and regaled us with stories of antiquing. Too bad we couldn't stand their much longer as we were sweltering in the shop with no A/C.

One of the things he told us, was that he attended the 600-mile garage sale every year and made a killing. It went from St. Joseph, MO to Denver. Interesting, I'd heard of it, but didn't realize it was in St. Joe.

Well, he was wrong. I did a little investigating and it's really called the Hwy 36 Treasure Hunt and crosses the entire state of Kansas. (FYI, there really is a 600-mile garage sale called the 127 corridor sale).

We decided to go for it, and in the process, we'd take the trailer with us. What's the point of finding a great deal in the middle of nowhere, if your trailer is 250 miles away back home!!

What we quickly realized was a couple things:
1. We should have started out earlier. We left from our house, and by the time we hit the antique booth to drop off a couple things and stumbled across a great garage sale, we didn't really get to hwy 36 until around 9:30 a.m. Mistake.

2. I pictured a lot of vendors along the highway at key places, but really, it boiled down to a lot of towns TRYING to have town wide garage sales. When you're not local, that's kind of hard to find... so we just followed signs when people had them out.

Garage sales were everywhere, and we actually had better luck than when we're at home. We wanted to stock up on some merchandise for our booth to get us through the winter - and now we have a dining room full of crap that needs to go into storage. BLECH.

We had fun, would probably try it again with a different angle (like driving way out into KS, spending the night and then getting up at the buttcrack of dawn to head out towards home).

My favorite find of the weekend, however, did NOT come from the treasure hunt:

{cat for sale}

It came from the store where we have our booth! This awesome sweet little chair will be a great prop for families and seniors! Small, light weight, cute and fits in the back of my jeep with no problems!

When we get the studio built, it will be seating in the waiting area/prop for photos.

Which, I don't think I shared. Gene and I are planning on breaking ground on a studio here at the Cease Fire Ranch in the spring! It might take a while to get done, but we're moving in that direction and I am SO HAPPY about it I can hardly sit still.

Of course, I'll keep you updated - and invite you all to the opening party. Hopefully that will happen sometime this decade!