The Dixie Highway Yard Sale is a 90 mile long sale that takes place the first weekend in June. It starts just north of Marietta, Georgia and goes north to Ringgold, Georgia. It follows along the Dixie Hwy/Old Hwy 41/Hwy41. I shopped the sale from Cartersville to Calhoun on Saturday and it took most of the day to cover that distance. After talking to several other shoppers, I found out that I shopped the best areas and that areas north of Calhoun and south of Cartersville did not have as many sales.

I had my best experience with the Dixie Hwy sale this year. I had only done it couple of other times but I just didn’t find as much those years.  My friend Anne went with me and we were both able to find a good many treasures. It was quite hot (88 degrees) but we brought water and sandwiches and successfully made it through the day. I do recommend drinking a lot of water when shopping these kind of sales in the summer. You can get dehydrated very quickly out there and it makes for a miserable day. Also, make sure you use sunscreen. Oftentimes vendors are set up out in the direct sunlight and you won’t have any shade.

As I said earlier, we started in Cartersville, Georgia. It is about an hour northwest of Atlanta. We arrived there around 9:00 in the morning. Most vendors had started their sales the previous day so they were already set up for business.

Normally there are a lot of mega sales along the route but I don’t think there were as many this year because of health concerns. Most of the sales were either individual sales or 3 -4 groups set up in one space. I think the most we saw at any one area was about 15.

The Dixie sale is different from most highway yard sales. It had a lot more true yard sales, as in toys and kids clothes. There were a lot of adult clothes out there too though. There were clothes everywhere. I was in the market for vintage and antiques and there just wasn’t a lot of that out there. I was okay with that though. And here’s why. A lot of these kind of sales are dominated by antique dealers. With that you get a great variety of antique and vintage items, but you also tend to get antique store prices (even though it is called a yard sale). This sale had fewer antique and vintage items, but the ones I saw were much more reasonably priced. So while I didn’t get as much, I got some great deals.

Here are a few more things that we saw along the way. I don’t usually like the rusty and crusty pieces but I did like the looks of this old wheelbarrow.

A box full of old license plates.

An old rotary phone.

An interesting assortment of coffee grinders.

Buckets and pails still seem quite popular.

Anne and I both saw this Christmas tree brooch art at the same time from opposite sides of the sale. We both rushed over there to check it out. It was so cool. Someone had spent a lot of time planning and make this. Neither one of us bought it though. It was sixty dollars. I think that is a very reasonable antique store price but it was more than we wanted to spend at a yard sale.

It had both new and vintage brooches on it.

This particular sale had a lot of ephemera and old books.

And here is Anne in front of an old truck. Whenever she sees an old truck she always gets a picture in front of it. She told me she has about forty of these types of pictures!

The sale was a huge success for both of us. I will show you what I bought in my next post.