Books and Battles

One of the reasons we love Tennessee is McKay's Used Book store, they have stores in Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville. We've been known to drive out of our way to stop at one of the stores. The trick we found is that as we travel around we stop at a lot of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores to pick up our books for 50 cents to a dollar, once we read them we put them in a box and save them for trade in. The first time we stopped at McKay's , about five years ago, we had about 50 paperbacks, you drop them off at the trade in counter when you go in and the give you a numbered receipt. When you see your number on the board you go back and they exchange the receipt for either cash or a voucher to purchase books with (the voucher is worth more then double the cash), the first voucher we got was for about $55.00. The vouchers are good forever and at any store and if you end up with more then one they will combine them for you, our last voucher was for over $89.00. We'll use most of that before we leave here stock piling books, then we save everything again until we get to the next one. We've probably gotten over $700 worth of books from them over the years and never spent a penny out of pocket, other then 50 cents or a dollar per book at the flea markets and such. If you love books like we do be prepared to spend at least an hour there, probably more because they are huge stores.

Today we went for a little drive along Missionary Ridge, this is the site of one of the major battles in this area during the Civil War, it's a very narrow winding road that as the name sez follows the ridge from one end to the other. It's a beautiful drive with some fantastic homes and very few places to park. The neat thing is that since the battle took place here and it's a National Park Service area there are monuments, markers, statues and signs everywhere along the street, which means in everybody's front yard. With so few parking areas it's very hard to stop and see them or get pictures. The NPS tried to place any canons exactly as they would have been during the battle, we passed one house that had two canons in the front yard, one on each side of the walk and pointed right at the front door, makes getting the morning paper a little strange.