Nashville Flea Market - The Good, The Bad, and......

So some of you know how bloody excited I was about heading out to the Nashville Flea Market a couple weeks ago.  When you have your itinerary scheduled down to bathroom breaks, this is a serious trip!  One of my kids was headed to Awa-Con that weekend with friends, so we packed - minimally - the other three kids up in the truck fully prepared to come back with a load and a half!

Then freaking reality hit when we got there!

When we first walked in, my heart went into overdrive at all the AMAZING stuff for sale there.  Trust me when I say to head straight to the back if you wanna see the really cool stuff that's for sale.  You will be so overwhelmed by it all that your head will literally spin and you will swoon wildly for everything around you.

It's THAT good!

Here's the problem:  after walking around, and around, and still around again - in cowboy boots - in the hot sun - with two of my children thinking they were at an old fashioned "Toys R Us" store......   we couldn't find hardly a thing that resembled anything close to "reasonably priced".  Now, we have not been in business but for a year, so spending $20 dollars a piece for a four foot pointy wooden fence post is not exactly in the budget right now.

See this gorgeous Florence Green Mirror:

It's yours for a mere $350!

I simply loved it, but not at that price.  I have the exact frame (well... almost the exact frame), in my garage and we picked it up at a yard sale for $5!  Time to pull it out and do something with it now.

I couldn't touch anything in this booth for under $100 - **sniff**   **sniff**:

Same here - these metal boxes were being sold for $100 a piece and the wooden sewing drawers were $75!....... But I loved them so!!!

Not sure where these came from but I thought they would be pretty cool for a retro-style a poolside bath house.  See the little pointy wooden fence posts beside them?  Those are the $20-a-piece fence posts.

And there were even more really cool goodies that I didn't have the budget for:

Even found this wonderful young entrepreneur selling her own line of chalk paint.  Good for her!!

THAT I could afford, LOL!!

It is with a very heavy heart that I have to say........  we came home with........ nothing!  I have to admit that I was pretty much in tears for a week afterwards.  That is when I completely shut down and eat dark chocolate and curl up with "Heroes" reruns until I'm better.  Yes, it was that traumatic for me!

The hubs did try to revive my spirits a bit by taking us all the the Space Center in Huntsville, AL on the way back.  

I have to admit, it was kinda fun.  You sort of live through your kids in one of these moments; trying to absorb their excitement and happiness.  I was till craving my dark chocolate though.

And when you're with your kids on one of this excursions, it is mandatory to visit just about everything!  Even if it means falling asleep in one of the exhibits - which can turn into kinda of an awkward moment.

"Ok Julian, you can wake up NOW!"

And as soon as they ARE awake, it's back to more fun with them convincing you that it IS okay for a 40-something woman to dangle 30 feet above the ground from a rope wrapped between her legs.  No, not today - I'll let them do it!  If there had been a couple of glasses of Pinot Nior served just prior to the event, I might have considered it!

After safely arriving home with nothing to show for it but a carload of kids crayons and other art paraphernalia, I was officially in a depression.  It didn't help that my oldest daughter didn't want to have anything to do with me joining her entourage to Awa-Con that weekend because she loathed the idea of a "mother-daughter bonding trip" (but that's a whole other story for a whole other day).  I was seriously in the dumps which literally took me a whole week to snap out of.

Then I got BACK to work, because NEXT time I go - I'm gonna have a wad of money and MY truck is gonna be one of the full ones coming home!

Vintage Resurrections