It starts today, August 7, and continues through August 10, on a route stretching for 654 miles from West Unity, Ohio to Gadsden, Alabama, along US Highway 127 and the Lookout Mountain Parkway. The official host of the event is Fentress County in Tennessee.

The patient, determined yard sale shopper with an eagle eye and iron constitution lives for the heat of August and the 127 Corridor Sale, also known as the World’s Longest Yard Sale.

Participant vendors either set up in a front yard along the route, or cluster in vacant lots and fields. Bumper-to-bumper shopper traffic can make navigation rather hairy, so I’d recommend taking only a few chunks of the route and get finished early, before the good stuff is picked over (or you’re broiled in the heat.)

Here’s a .pdf map of the yard sale route; not surprisingly, there are also numerous key Civil War battlefields and parks along the way, should you grow tired of picking through furniture, crockery, Grandma’s lamps, artwork and other assorted “junque.”

Rachael Ray’s TV show featured the sale and has good tips for prospective shoppers, and so does the HGTV.com shopping site.  Make sure you have some lodging options set up ahead of time, and a cooler with some food - these are rural areas for the most part and they are overrun this time of year.

(Related PT post:  Trash and treasures in Mount Dora, Florida)

Here’s a WQED Pittsburgh video about the 127 Corridor sale:

The other day I was walking through my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and saw something that made me realize I’m getting old. Or at least older. That’s what happens when something you used regularly in your childhood suddenly becomes a vintage/retro cool collectible.

Gear from the defunct airline Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) suddenly has the hip retro factor akin to the Cool Brittania phase of just a few years ago. Barnes & Noble is selling cards, notebooks, journals, and tote bags featuring Pan Am’s stark blue-and-white logo, and plenty of other sites are selling a new line of luggage featuring the airline’s graphics. I’ve even heard that Marc Jacobs, a high-end designer, has designed one of these bags.

One site peddling the gear had me laughing my head off this morning. “These bags remind us of a better day when air travel was elegant,” it says enthusiastically. Maybe. But I traveled Pan Am a number of times in the years just before it went bust, and while the world-shaped logo might remind others of days when you dressed up for flying, the same logo was slapped on the cramped, overcrowded, smelly flights my family took back and forth to the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s.

Seeing the Pan Am logo in my local bookstore, selling with all the hype of hip, did remind me of really awful airline food when you could still get it, but it also sent me back to those first heady days of living overseas when I was still a kid, when everything was absolutely fascinating and new and fresh and no matter how bad the transatlantic flight was, it was still the coolest thing on earth to be doing it. Sometimes we don’t know how lucky we are.

After thinking about travel down a canopy road in Florida (featuring Bradley’s Country Store) I now have small-town general stores on the brain.

In pretty Valle Crucis — near North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway — stands the Mast General Store, ready to sell boots and buttons since 1883.

A smaller, more Southern version of New England retail stalwart LL Bean, it advertises “cradles to caskets” because “if you can’t buy it here, you don’t need it.”

The original Valle Crucis store is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it’s well worth a stop to poke around in the old-fashioned mercantile section (cast-iron cookware, stone ground meal, bag balm salves, kids’ slingshots) or the traditional clothing (flannels and boxers, straw hats, rubber waders or bright red union suits complete with button flaps.)

Mast General Store is now a small chain of shops in North Carolina, with one each in Greenville SC and Knoxville TN, but the original one features the circa 1909 Annex just down the road.

The building used to house a competing store, but now it’s a sports and casual clothing outfitter.

The key thing about the Annex is that it has the Mast Store Candy Barrel, full of pecan divinity, horehound rootbeer barrels, Maple Nut Goodies, Bit-O-Honey and all the other candy favorites.

Yum.

The photo at the top of the post is the checkers table, ready to go with the requisite bottlecap checkers.

Linger awhile and play, maybe with an ice-cold RC Cola and Moon Pie in hand.

Related posts:

• Carolina BBQ will fix what ails you
• The Blue Ridge Arts Scene
• Carolina….nothing finer

(This series is cross-posted with the Family Travel blog.)

Welcome to the third and final video in this series about inexpensive and unique travel souvenirs. I want ‘em cheap, I want ‘em to bring a smile to my face and remind me of the place where I bought them and if at all possible, I’d like ‘em to be useful.

Part One started us out with a variety of small items that you can find almost anywhere, Part Two covered “the obvious” T-shirts and coffee mugs, and here in Part Three, I will take a walk through my home to show you a few of my souvenir favorites and tell you the story of the “Diarrhea T-shirt.”

Thanks for your patience as I learn the ins and outs of my Flip video camera….including the discovery that I need to do better with the closeup feature. :)

For my RSS/feed readers and anyone else who can’t see the video box below, click this URL to go straight to the video on YouTube.

(This series is cross-posted on the Family Travel blog.)

Welcome back to this three-part video series about shopping for inexpensive travel souvenirs. I had no idea how much stuff I’d collected over the years until I pulled it all out to shoot a video.

Part One was a general overview of my souvenir philosophy (inexpensive, evocative of origin and hopefully useful in daily life) with some examples of fun items I’ve scored, like a rubber ear acupuncture training device from the medical supplies section of a Hong Kong department store. Gee, maybe that’s not very useful in daily life….:)

Part Two below talks about the items everyone seems to find: coffee mugs and T-shirts. Watch the video for my suggestions on how to find unique versions of them during your travels.

Part Three, the final video, will give you a quick tour of assorted doo-dads in my house, many picked up for a song, including a fun Harry Potter movie poster in Japanese.

For RSS/feed readers and anyone else who may not be able to see the box, click here for the YouTube URL for the video.