Day 2

So I woke up in the Bean Pot campground and it was my birthday. We headed out and drove down south about twentyfive miles and and picked up where we left off the day before. We found a huge encampment with about two hundred vendors and immediately felt overwhelmed, realizing that this alone could take us the better part of the day to explore.

The day began promisingly. I happened upon a father daughter team selling primarily tools (one, if not the most prevalent goods for sale on the route) and I found a pile of locks with the word "Buster" emblazoned on them. Score. I bought ten. I proceeded and came across a very forward thinking General Custer looking man in a wheelchair, who was a very knowledgeable and personable man who knew in detail everything about his inventory. After talking to him for a while, I felt comfortable enough to ask him if he had any risque items. He showed me postcards with pin-ups on them and then a bunch of Vargas prints. While showing me these items, he kept cracking jokes about how the ladies were his old high school sweethearts and his ex-wives... As we were leaving he also launched into anti-Bush diatribe and excitedly voiced his desire to put firecrackers up Dick Cheney's ass. He vehemently said that he thought Bush and Cheney should be charged for war crimes. Hurrah. My kinda man.

Christine then called me over to look at a bouncy metal rocking horse from the 50's. I liked the look of it immediately, especially because it had pretty brown moving eyeballs. In fact, for the rest of the trip, the horse's gaze followed us as we were driving. Every time we looked back at it, it was pensively looking at us with a kind of sideways sweet and loopy curious gaze. After I gave the man the money for the horse he said apologetically, "I'm sorry I thought you was a boy" to which I responded, "Don't worry, it's OK, I'm a little bit o' both, sir."

Back in another field, we saw a old very heavy medical exam floor length light that was being sold by a Lynyrd Skynyrd looking dude. He bummed us a cigarette and while we smoked together, he told me he got a lot of stuff from the local university laboratory and mentioned he had a buddy who could possibly hook me up with items in the future. I gave him my card and told him to email me. This light turned out to be the heaviest thing we bought and the most awkward to drive with in the van. Hopefully, it will prove to be a worthwhile purchase.

One of the oddest people we met later that afternnon, was a man who was straight out of Deliverance. He was standing amid piles of rusty farm equipment and when I tried to negotiate a lower price for some horse tack, he could barely utter a complete sentence and kept talking about his "boss?" who controlled the firm prices. Regardless of the items I wanted to buy, I couldn't help but wonder how this person could function and survive in the world with such a limited ability to simply communicate. It made me sad.

After six hours of shopping at a couple of these massive carnival-like tented encampments, we had progressed a grand total of about one mile (!) along the route. Our hopes of driving four hundred miles and making it to either Kentucky and/or Alabama slowly dwindled, when we realized how dense the shopping was in the area we chose to start in.

After a nice lady with clear green eyes (who I thought sounded like Dolly Parton) told us about a campground in Pickett State Park, we drove there to secure a spot before nightfall. As it was my birthday, we went out to find a place to celebrate, only to find that the town was completely desolate and the only thing open was WalMart and McDonald's. We choose McDonald's and had a festive meal, ordering hamburgers, fries, sodas and a side salad and an apple pie and a milkshake. Pure decadence, eh?