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 (and here’s the direct URL to the video if you can’t see the embedded box:)
