Last weekend was the Neosho City-wide Sale. My best friend and I attend every year. We make it a point to have clear schedules and only major events will stop us. The Neosho City-wide is our area’s largest city-wide sale. There’s almost a carnival feel to it. People cook hot dogs, hamburgers, egg rolls, tacos, corn dogs, popcorn, and have a variety of baked goods for sale. Schools, churches, and civic organizations run their fund raisers for everything from mission trips to band camp.
Tammy and I go for the thrill of the hunt. We love sniffing out hidden gems and scoring amazing deals. My deal of the day was a Wolfgang Puck stainless steel saute pan for which I paid $3.00. It was sticky and the bottom was black with caked on grease and rust from the outdoor grill on which it had been used. I brought it home and cleaned it up with an SOS pad. It now gleams in the light. It’s beautiful, and I can hardly wait to use it.
I love art, so I was thrilled to find a church that was selling several mosaics by a local artist. Since I’m making baskets for the Ozarks Writers League silent auction, I bought three. I plan to keep one and donate the other two gorgeous pieces. I also bought a few other wall art pieces for the auction.
If you know me, then you know I love books. No city-wide adventure is complete without me buying a few books. I really scored this time. I bought 19 books during the sale. Coincidentally, Always Buying Books had Girls Night Out that evening, and I bought 23 more books there. They weren’t all for me. A few were for my family members, but most of them are mine. The time to buy books is whenever you see them at a great price.
The most interesting that happened this year was my bifocal glasses breaking. I don’t mean I broke them. I mean they broke. I had just stepped into a stall in the restroom at McDonalds when the screw popped out and they fell off my face in two pieces. I couldn’t find the screw, and the glasses wouldn’t stay together without it. Did that stop us? Of course not!
I wore my prescription sunglasses everywhere except the Chinese restaurant where we ate lunch. It was too dark in there for me to see with my shades, so Tammy guided me through the buffet line to make certain I didn’t grab anything spicy. Everything was blurry, but it tasted great. This is bound to become one of our favorite city-wide tales.
The people are super friendly. We were walking down Oakridge Drive to Tammy’s car with our spoils when a woman we’d never met joined us on the street. She chatted about raising her kids as a single mom and how well they are doing as adults. She told us about her neighbor who is having a difficult time and explained that she was out buying clothes for her neighbor’s children to help out. She even showed us some shirts she bought for the little girl.
There’s only one thing about the Neosho City-wide that disappoints me. Tammy and I always check out the food vendors in the hopes of finding funnel cakes. We had them one year, and haven’t been able to find anyone making them since. We did enjoy some delicious egg rolls, but there were no funnel cakes in sight. Maybe next year.
There is no experience like a good city-wide sale. If you ever have a chance to attend Neosho’s city-wide, I highly recommend you see it for yourself. The Neosho City-wide Sale is always the first weekend in April unless that falls on Easter. Then it’s the second weekend. Good hunting!
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