California Antiques Road Trip

Greg and I hadn’t planned to drive a huge truck of antiques 2,800 miles from our gallery in Newberry, South Carolina, to California by way of the Grand Canyon... but that is exactly what we did! It’s just as well that we both love to get out of town and take a road trip when the opportunity presents itself!

When we sold a very large order to a customer in California, earlier this year, we planned to ship the order in a 40-foot container across the country and fly out to make the delivery ourselves to ensure that everything went smoothly. But our perfect plan kept going off the rails. After the sixth trucker canceled our load, we realized it was time to take matters into our own hands. Most retailers across the country are stocking up inventory in preparation for the upcoming holidays now, so there are currently more trucking jobs than truckers out on the roads and truckers can pick and choose which loads they want to carry.

A Container from California

Then we tried to get a container dropped at our gallery for a day so that we could carefully load all of the antiques into the container, but no one wanted to leave their trailer overnight. Next we tried to do a “live load” but we needed at least 8 hours to be able to carefully pack the trailer. Again, no one wanted to wait while we loaded, so we decided to rent a 26-foot U-Haul truck and just drive the load ourselves!  Turns out this will be the mother of all road trips - 2800 miles!

On the first day we went through quite a few cities: Newberry, SC, Atlanta, GA, Birmingham, AL, Tupelo, MS, Memphis, TN, crossed the Mississippi River, finally reaching Forrest City, AR.

The Great Southwest

The cities became fewer with more distance in between on the second day: Little Rock, AR, Oklahoma City, OK, finally reaching Amarillo, TX. Here's a good ole Texan waffle!

We happened to be passing Albuquerque, NM, around lunch time. Greg and I are big fans of the TV show, Breaking Bad, so we decided to find Los Pollos Hermanos, the Mexican restaurant that is featured prominently in the show. The food was just okay, but it was fun to sit in Walter White’s booth.

In my next blog post about our California Antiques Road Trip Part 2, I'll be doing yoga in the Grand Canyon and we'll visit the spooky Winchester Mystery House. And.. oh yes! You'll find out if we managed to deliver our mega-truck of antiques to our California client on time!