Getting to Know You, Austin #3 - City Wide Garage Sale

You can read about the introduction and reasoning behind this here...

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I know it's been a couple of weeks, but work has been crazy. This week came popsicle stick #3:

This has been going on here in Austin for YEARS but I never went. I got curious because the signs are everywhere and I wanted to check out the format and such: is it really a bunch of people from a neighborhood getting together to sell their unused stuff? Or was it more of an antique mall set up? Or was it a whole bunch of sales people selling garages? Who knows?

As you can see here, the website is fairly unclear.

So, I convinced a friend of mine who hadn't been before either to come with me so we could see what this was all about. We go to the Palmer Events Center and pay $7 for parking and walk over to find that it costs $6 to get in. So... I have to pay to shop and rifle through other people's junk? Strike 1 right there.
We pay, we go in and we find that it's much more antique mall than it is garage sale. Yes, there's haggling and no price is fixed, but it's the same with an antique mall - nothing is really fixed at those as long as you can get a hold of the booth owner.
We gave it a chance and meandered through the aisles making sure to hit each booth/table/etc but it wasn't anything special. If you need a set of glass nubbled stemware from the late 70's that's missing a glass or entire boxes of sports cards or tables and tables of questionable linens, this is the place for you. Otherwise, disappointing. This stick goes in the "don't need to do this again" jar.

We left and were going to find something else to do but realized that we were virtually in the middle of town and why waste $7 on parking for an hour of disappointment? We decided to walk down to the park and find the new boardwalk on Town Lake (I'll never call it Lady Bird Lake) and see what the haps was. We weren't TOO far, but we were further than we thought away from the start of it so we had already walked about 2 miles to find it. It was hot, we were hungry and thirsty so we diverted to the Joe's Crab Shack (also very disappointing but it was the nearest food) for lunch and beverages before heading back. We took the main road back and stopped for some Sandy's Hamburgers and called it a day.

In reality, 3 popsicle sticks were completed on this day as Sandy's and Town Lake are in my jar but since they weren't the one chosen this week and because I want to do them again and right, this only counts as one.

Final tally: great day but paying to shop and paying to shop at a disappointing place/event = a big fat NO jar.