If you have been following this series of articles, I hope you’ve enjoyed our previous stories: Part 1: The Collector, Part 2: The Dead-End Road, Part 3: The Collapsing Barn, Part 4: The Cat Lady House, Part 5: The Garage Sale, and Part 6: The Root Cellar. These stories are all about the shopping adventures that my family and I have had while out sourcing vintage treasures for our shop.
Join us on yet another vintage treasure hunting adventure in Part 7 of this series of articles…
The Parade of Chairs
I love shopping estate sales and auctions, but I have to say – shopping flea markets is the most exciting to me. I love that there are so many vendors in one place, and all with such different things to bring to the market. I rarely leave a flea market empty-handed!
My family and I discovered a flea market we had never been to, so decided to make the detour to the flea market on our way to the cabin for a holiday weekend. The flea market was the Wright County Swappers Meet in South Haven, Minnesota. It took us a little longer to get there than we anticipated, so we didn’t arrive until almost 10 a.m. Now, if you shop flea markets, you know 10 a.m. is definitely a late arrival. But, the website said the flea market was open until 1 p.m., so we thought we had several hours yet to shop. Since it was a holiday weekend, there were hundreds of vendors and thousands of shoppers.
To start out, we parked the truck in back of a sedan. The owners were just getting back to their car from shopping. As we got out of our truck, my husband said “Hi!” to one of the gals loading a treasure into their trunk – ends up she and my husband work together – almost 2 hours away from this flea market! Never ceases to amaze me how small our world can be sometimes.
With each member of our family towing a flea market cart, we began walking up and down each aisle, accumulating treasures and filling our carts quickly! I spotted an old vertical file system with the most awesome patina and knew I had to buy it. The problem was, our Yukon XL was already loaded with our clothes, coolers of food, and fishing gear that we were bringing to the cabin that weekend – so we were already near capacity in our truck. I convinced my husband that we could shuffle things around a little bit and make room for the file cabinet – after all, it did come apart into sections. 🙂 The cabinet was too difficult to cart around, so while my husband went to get our truck to load the cabinet, my boys and I continued shopping – and accumulating more treasures (I knew we’d find a way to get everything in the truck – right?!).
the last chair available in our shop
My husband was able to load the cabinets into our truck, then parked (again). He tracked us down and we continued on. About one-third of the way through the flea market, we spotted a large trailer that was filled with school chairs from the 1950s and 1960s – in bright orange and bright turquoise, and in both adult size and child size. I wanted to buy all of them! But, because I knew we had very limited available space in the truck at this point, I could only manage a dozen of the chairs. I didn’t want to have my husband go back out and get the truck again, so we carefully stacked the chairs on top of the carts we each were toting.
As we made our way through the flea market, we were walking in single file so we didn’t take up the entire aisle – I was in the lead with my three sons in tow, and my husband took up the rear. People that were sitting in their booths or on benches were laughing and commenting that we looked like a parade of chairs. I wish I would have had a vintage flag to wave – now that would have been fun!
We realized our carts were full, but we were only half-way through the flea market and I insisted we at least walk down as many aisles as possible – because you just never know what’s waiting there. Well, maybe it was kismet, because at that time, we realized vendors were all starting to pack up, and many of them had left already… And it was only 11:30 a.m! We were almost running down the last aisles, towing our carts of chairs and other finds, and hoping to spot “one last treasure”. I’m sure we were quite the sight!
We didn’t find anything else to take home with us (pretty hard to find the good things when you are running past the remaining open booths), so we made it back to our truck. But we quickly realized the truck would need to be completely unpacked and repacked in order to fit everything back inside. Either that, or we were going to have to draw straws to see which kid would be left behind. Just kidding. We would never leave a kid behind. But I was eyeballing the roof of the truck wondering if that would be a smooth ride to the cabin for one of them… lol!
Overall, it was a really fun flea market – despite the fact that we had to power-shop towards the end. We did manage to get everything into the truck (it’s nice to have an engineer in the family to fit things together in the least amount of space), and we had a fun time at the cabin!
The Lesson? When shopping flea markets, make sure to bring enough “muscle” with you – you never know what you might score and you’ll need those extra hands to help you carry everything. And try to get there early – like when they first open – so you don’t have to run through the aisles in an attempt to “see it all”. Oh… and an old vintage flag could make your “parade” even more fun – LOL.
some of the larger items from the flea market
There you have it! Another shopping adventure with my family. Check back for more stories in this series of articles!
Do you have a favorite vintage shopping adventure story? We’d love to hear it! Share the details in a comment below.
What an adventure! Got a chuckle about maybe one of the children could sit on the roof! Quite a haul and love that file cabinet! Thank you for sharing such a great story!