One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and there will be plenty of both at the 127 Yard Sale, scheduled this summer for Aug. 6 through 9. What began in 1987 as a way to tempt travelers off interstate highways and onto the byways and back roads of Tennessee now stretches 690 miles across six states: Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.
“Yard sale” can be a bit of a misnomer; vendors set up their displays in all sorts of spots along the route.
The “world’s longest yard sale” is held annually during the first weekend of August, with some 2,200 vendors and hundreds of thousands of people attending. My wife and I dropped by for an afternoon last summer near Eaton, Ohio, and found making stop after stop not only fun but addictive.
A four-day, late-summer party for yard-sale junkies, the majority of the route follows U.S. Highway 127, which crosses Ohio north to south along the entire western edge of the Buckeye State. There are literally hundreds of vendor locations spread along the way, including seven “major vendor stops” in Ohio.
More information for both yard-salers and vendors can be found online. The site features an interactive route map, and there is even a countdown clock showing the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Thursday, Aug. 6!
By the way, you don’t happen to have any old Elvis Presley records for sale, do you?
