Thursday, August 15, 2013

Trying to Find an Antique Store....

My friend Sue and I took off for Angola, New York last week.
Angola is near Buffalo and that is where Sue's mom lives.  Sue's sister-in-law found a cool dresser for her and we decided to do a little road trip and fetch it back to Manassas.

(I may have mentioned earlier that in August for the past few years Sue and I zip up to a giant antique flea market in upper New York.  For various reasons this year we couldn't go, so this was a good substitute.)

In the past whenever we would head up to Bouchville we would drive like crazy and try to get there as soon as we could, stopping only for gas, potty breaks, breakfast, lunch, a certain Fashion Bug store near Scranton, PA, and maybe dinner.

This time, we decided that we would take time, stop and smell the roses, and go to any antique store that caught our fancy.

In another post i will talk about what a great time we had with Sue's family and the sight-seeing we did and the great food we ate.  But for now, let's talk about the antique stores.

The first one was in Hanover, MD.  We had stopped to buy a pie at a great pie shop and while trying to find the interstate again, we passed by a sign that said Neptune's Attic.  YES! Our first random antique store!!  It had some crappy furniture out front, but the inside looked promising.  Inside it had a really bad mold and mice and some other undefinable smell.  And the prices were ridiculous, so we wandered back to the street and that's when we saw that the next store was Neptune's attic - an aquarium store.  The store we had been in was called "The Jesus Christ Our Lord Thrift Shop".  Well, it must have been the maids century off because we sneezed and coughed for quite a few miles afterwards, trying to clear our lungs.

The next store was a few days later on our way back home ...evidently all the cute little antique stores are on I-81, not the roads that we were traveling on.

So we were coming from a pottery - again looking for the interstate - and it was pouring down rain when we saw the  big white barn with the words "Antiques - Honk to see if we're here" painted on it.   Looked promising!  We honked and they were there so we ran in out of the rain. That old barn was dark and crowded and had lots of rooms - just the place for a rainy afternoon!
We'd made the circuit of one room when, of course, I had to go to the bathroom.  
It never fails!!
We asked the strange looking farmer-ly type owner and his equally strange looking helper if they had a restroom.
"Oh yeah", he said.  "Just follow me."
As we followed him, I have to admit that visions of Pulp Fiction flitted thru my mind and I prayed that he wouldn't lead us to the basement.
Oh no, he lead us outside and pointed to the next field over and said see that little white building?
Oh great.  A port-a-potty.  Across a field.  In the pouring rain.  But, we did have to pee.  So off we went, with the strange looking farmer-ly type owner and his equally strange looking helper laughing their asses off.

We got there and Sue graciously said "Go ahead.  I'll wait."

I cautiously opened the door and what I saw made my self-esteem immediately shriek "GO AHEAD - WET YOUR PANTS - THERE ARE DRY ONES IN THE CAR!!!" 

I shut the door and turned to Sue and said "Um, you can go if you want.  I'm not going in there."

As Sue very well knows it has got to be REALLY bad if I won't go in, so together we opened the door, looked inside and here is what we saw:

Shown actual size....
That spider was sitting in a web right by the toilet seat with about eighty just as large dead spiders laying all around it.  
And just to round things out, the port-a-potty was a "two-holer". and the other seat was closed with a huge rock holding the lid down. 

We did not want to know what the rock was holding in.

I won't say that we ran screaming across the field to the car, but I do think that we broke several previously held sprinting records.  

We both agreed that antiques are seriously overrated, and well, we have enough of 'em anyway.

Spiders.   

We never had this much trouble spending money in Bouchville!!!!

3 comments:

  1. So, the list of Sue and Kim's Antique Shopping Cryptonite includes: hot weather with no A/C, and spiders. Good to know.

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  2. Audrey, When have you known hot weather to slow us down? We have antiqued in the heat and the rain and mud- but spiders are just going to far!!

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