Flack
07-16-2005, 12:27 PM
On Friday, my friend The Stranger and I decided to try something we have never done before. We planned a 350 mile (round trip) shopping road trip using only the Internet and my GPS. Our trip would take us through Lawton, OK and Wichita Falls, TX to Archer City, TX and back.
While The Stranger is a used bookstore aficionado, I (of course) was looking for thrift stores for games, and we both like looking at antique malls for toys and stuff. To prepare for our trip, we punched those key words into Google’s “local search” feature for each town and came up with names and addresses of places to hit. With nothing more than cash in our wallets and a list of addresses printed out, we hit the road.
For those of you who have never used GPS before, it’s a really fun tool! GPS uses government satellites to determine your exact location, and superimposes that over maps so you can tell exactly where you are and exactly where you’re headed. The software on my laptop has all the tools of Mapquest and more. It has amazing planning tools. One thing the program allows you to do is punch in a list of addresses and then plan a route on the fly. If you add or remove stops, the route updates itself, and if you get lost somehow, the route will continue to change and try and get you back on route. You can also run little queries, such as “show me every gas station within 10 miles” and they’ll pop up on the map. It’s a little like watching the “road trip planning scene” from the original Vacation movie.
Our first destination? Archer City, TX, population 1,800 and home of Booked Up, Inc.
Booked Up, Inc is a bookstore like no other. Owned by author Larry McMurty, Booked Up, Inc pretty much IS Archer City’s main street. Booked Up’s inventory of over 400,000 books is distributed throughout four separate, disconnected buildings. Want sci-fi books? Check building two. Looking for arts and crafts? Try building four. Everything in Booked Up works on the honor system. Once you’re done shopping, you take your finds back to building one, where you pay for them. Unfortunately The Stranger is a big fan of cheap paperbacks, and since Booked Up specializes in rather expensive hardbacks, so we left empty handed.
Other than Booked Up, there’s not much else to see in Archer City. Two blocks in any direction of the store, the town quickly fades into barren hay fields. There’s a Sonic on one end of town and a McDonald’s on the other, with a couple of gas stations in between. The one antique store had a hand-written sign handing in the window which read, “I went across the street. Be back in a little while.” With the GPS fired up and our list of addresses in hand, we set out to find Wichita Falls, TX.
Wichita Falls has a population of over 100,000 people, and has over two-dozen bookstores, antique malls and thrift stores combined. With the power of the GPS, finding the addresses was not the problem. Our problems were with the quality of our list, and the quality of the stores themselves.
One of the first stores we found, a Salvation Army thrift store, was dripping with gaming goods. I picked up several boxed Commodore 64 games (including Zork I and Scrabble), a book on beating Super Mario Brothers, and a copy of B-17 Bomber for 18 cents. There was a lot of other stuff there as well, like a boxed TI-994a (way overpriced at $8) and lots of PC odds and ends.
From there though, things began to go downhill. One problem was our list. Many of the stores listed under “thrift stores” on Google were not what I was looking for. Unfortunately, we didn’t find this out until we arrived at the stores themselves. For example one store, “New To You” turned out to sell refurbished furniture. No games there! Another store, “Home for Habitat Thrift”, only sold refurbished and cheap building supplies. I figured it was going to be a regular thrift store, like the Pets and People and League of the Blind stores.
Even worse was the quality of some of the stores. I like antique stores like I like garage sales. If you’re trying to make a living off of your prices, I’m probably not going to like your store. If you’re trying to get rid of stuff for pennies on the dollar, I’ll shop there all day long! One store we went to had vinyl records for $10 and paperback books for half their retail price.
At one antique store I found some antique software. Alone in the Dark and Faery Tale Adventure for the PC, along with a trackball which says “MS-DOS compatible” on the side of the box. I picked up all 3 for $10, just because it was a find. The clerk had actually offered to take $25 for the entire shelf, but most of the other programs there were applications and utilities from the same era. $3.33 per title isn’t the greatest deal in the world, but the place had air conditioning (most of the other places we visited didn’t) and so I felt like buying something just to help out with their electricity bill.
One cool thing we found in Wichita Falls was a pamphlet that had the locations of all the other antique malls and thrift stores in town. This was a great opportunity for the GPS to shine, and it led us from location to location with relatively no problems (any errors that cropped into our navigation were usually due to operator error).
Along with all those other stores, Wichita Falls also has a Hastings, a GameStop and a few other gaming stores. Once we had sufficiently pilfered the town and our bellies were full of Applebees grub, we hit the road and headed out to Lawton, OK, home of Fort Sill and many other shopping targets.
Unfortunately since we had spent so much time running back and forth across Wichita Falls, we were running out of time. We were afraid that many of the places we had planned on stopping at in Lawton would close at 5pm and we didn’t arrive in town until 5:30pm. First, we punched in The Stranger’s list of bookstores. Unfortunately, our Internet listing turned out to be a bust. Some of the stores had moved, some had closed down, and one turned out to be an Adult bookstore. I got excited when I saw the word “arcade” on the front window but The Stranger informed me that it didn’t mean what I thought it did.
Lawton, especially near Ft. Sill, turned out to be pretty run down and rough. We did not have the courage to enter “Big Mama’s Thrift” after watching an old drunk black man wearing a lampshade on his head come staggering by and walking into the place. The GameCrazy we stumbled upon was also in a seemingly rough area. I found a loose SNES in a Goodwill store but left it, nodding at the kid behind the counter in the Dead Kennedys shirt on the way out.
And that is how I spent twelve hours yesterday – driving, navigating, shopping and (of course) singing along to 80’s tunes (a staple of every road trip). Lawton and Archer City were kind of a bust but Wichita Falls was pretty cool. More than the game finds, we learned that we could plan and navigate ourselves from anywhere to anywhere with the help of the GPS unit and a few addresses. Who knows where our next trip will lead us!
While The Stranger is a used bookstore aficionado, I (of course) was looking for thrift stores for games, and we both like looking at antique malls for toys and stuff. To prepare for our trip, we punched those key words into Google’s “local search” feature for each town and came up with names and addresses of places to hit. With nothing more than cash in our wallets and a list of addresses printed out, we hit the road.
For those of you who have never used GPS before, it’s a really fun tool! GPS uses government satellites to determine your exact location, and superimposes that over maps so you can tell exactly where you are and exactly where you’re headed. The software on my laptop has all the tools of Mapquest and more. It has amazing planning tools. One thing the program allows you to do is punch in a list of addresses and then plan a route on the fly. If you add or remove stops, the route updates itself, and if you get lost somehow, the route will continue to change and try and get you back on route. You can also run little queries, such as “show me every gas station within 10 miles” and they’ll pop up on the map. It’s a little like watching the “road trip planning scene” from the original Vacation movie.
Our first destination? Archer City, TX, population 1,800 and home of Booked Up, Inc.
Booked Up, Inc is a bookstore like no other. Owned by author Larry McMurty, Booked Up, Inc pretty much IS Archer City’s main street. Booked Up’s inventory of over 400,000 books is distributed throughout four separate, disconnected buildings. Want sci-fi books? Check building two. Looking for arts and crafts? Try building four. Everything in Booked Up works on the honor system. Once you’re done shopping, you take your finds back to building one, where you pay for them. Unfortunately The Stranger is a big fan of cheap paperbacks, and since Booked Up specializes in rather expensive hardbacks, so we left empty handed.
Other than Booked Up, there’s not much else to see in Archer City. Two blocks in any direction of the store, the town quickly fades into barren hay fields. There’s a Sonic on one end of town and a McDonald’s on the other, with a couple of gas stations in between. The one antique store had a hand-written sign handing in the window which read, “I went across the street. Be back in a little while.” With the GPS fired up and our list of addresses in hand, we set out to find Wichita Falls, TX.
Wichita Falls has a population of over 100,000 people, and has over two-dozen bookstores, antique malls and thrift stores combined. With the power of the GPS, finding the addresses was not the problem. Our problems were with the quality of our list, and the quality of the stores themselves.
One of the first stores we found, a Salvation Army thrift store, was dripping with gaming goods. I picked up several boxed Commodore 64 games (including Zork I and Scrabble), a book on beating Super Mario Brothers, and a copy of B-17 Bomber for 18 cents. There was a lot of other stuff there as well, like a boxed TI-994a (way overpriced at $8) and lots of PC odds and ends.
From there though, things began to go downhill. One problem was our list. Many of the stores listed under “thrift stores” on Google were not what I was looking for. Unfortunately, we didn’t find this out until we arrived at the stores themselves. For example one store, “New To You” turned out to sell refurbished furniture. No games there! Another store, “Home for Habitat Thrift”, only sold refurbished and cheap building supplies. I figured it was going to be a regular thrift store, like the Pets and People and League of the Blind stores.
Even worse was the quality of some of the stores. I like antique stores like I like garage sales. If you’re trying to make a living off of your prices, I’m probably not going to like your store. If you’re trying to get rid of stuff for pennies on the dollar, I’ll shop there all day long! One store we went to had vinyl records for $10 and paperback books for half their retail price.
At one antique store I found some antique software. Alone in the Dark and Faery Tale Adventure for the PC, along with a trackball which says “MS-DOS compatible” on the side of the box. I picked up all 3 for $10, just because it was a find. The clerk had actually offered to take $25 for the entire shelf, but most of the other programs there were applications and utilities from the same era. $3.33 per title isn’t the greatest deal in the world, but the place had air conditioning (most of the other places we visited didn’t) and so I felt like buying something just to help out with their electricity bill.
One cool thing we found in Wichita Falls was a pamphlet that had the locations of all the other antique malls and thrift stores in town. This was a great opportunity for the GPS to shine, and it led us from location to location with relatively no problems (any errors that cropped into our navigation were usually due to operator error).
Along with all those other stores, Wichita Falls also has a Hastings, a GameStop and a few other gaming stores. Once we had sufficiently pilfered the town and our bellies were full of Applebees grub, we hit the road and headed out to Lawton, OK, home of Fort Sill and many other shopping targets.
Unfortunately since we had spent so much time running back and forth across Wichita Falls, we were running out of time. We were afraid that many of the places we had planned on stopping at in Lawton would close at 5pm and we didn’t arrive in town until 5:30pm. First, we punched in The Stranger’s list of bookstores. Unfortunately, our Internet listing turned out to be a bust. Some of the stores had moved, some had closed down, and one turned out to be an Adult bookstore. I got excited when I saw the word “arcade” on the front window but The Stranger informed me that it didn’t mean what I thought it did.
Lawton, especially near Ft. Sill, turned out to be pretty run down and rough. We did not have the courage to enter “Big Mama’s Thrift” after watching an old drunk black man wearing a lampshade on his head come staggering by and walking into the place. The GameCrazy we stumbled upon was also in a seemingly rough area. I found a loose SNES in a Goodwill store but left it, nodding at the kid behind the counter in the Dead Kennedys shirt on the way out.
And that is how I spent twelve hours yesterday – driving, navigating, shopping and (of course) singing along to 80’s tunes (a staple of every road trip). Lawton and Archer City were kind of a bust but Wichita Falls was pretty cool. More than the game finds, we learned that we could plan and navigate ourselves from anywhere to anywhere with the help of the GPS unit and a few addresses. Who knows where our next trip will lead us!