First show of the year..!

Well, we did it....Larry and I drove off this past Thursday, headed for the mysterious Townsend, Tennessee...had NO IDEA what we might find there, beyond the Smoky Mountain National Forest.  It's important at this juncture to remember that Larry considers himself a Tennessean -- more like a closet Tennessean, if you ask me, since he only has relatives there.  But there is no accounting for what people think they are....So we'll let him have this one.  He's a Tennessean.  The closer he gets to the place, the more he aspirates the first syllable of words, dragging vowels out to outrageous widths (do vowels have width???).  We had a big ol' rented car, a Chevy Impala, which I do not recommend.  Sluggish, like a very badly designed bobsled.  Seats badly proportioned.  No padding on the steering wheel.  And so on.

First night, we got over the Kentucky line to Covington and found the first motel for which we could find a tourist coupon -- lovely room at a Holiday Inn Express for only 69 bucks.  Don't pass up those coupon books at rest stops!  Friday morning, back in the car, plunging ever more precipitously tinto (shudder) The Land of Rahn Paul.  We stopped, as usual, at a number of antique shops in search of old jewlery, wonderful vintage buttons, the usual distractions.....Here is downtown Georgetown, home to the picturesque Georgetown College:

and, courtesy of Larry, you're about to learn what happened to Baby Jane.  Remember her?  One of the spookiest movies ever made.....Not many buttons in this particular collectible shop in Georgetown, Kentucky, but they DID have these:

...not to mention the absolute ugliest crocheted hat in the entire world, encrusted entirely with glass beads....

and here is the  shop itself -- notable because it's very much like every other small-town shop in which we have found our wonderful vintage buttons.  In this case, no luck -- but that's the exception to a general rule of "small-town shop, big-time buttons." 

I'll create a separate blog entry for the rest of what we found......!  Google accepts only a handful of photographs per entry.      svb