<![CDATA[Yard Sale Adventures]]>So, I woke up ridiculously early this morning and drove a few hours to the next town for a yard sale that had been advertised online.  The ad boasted over 500 games for many different retro consoles and had a firm start time of 8:00 a.m.: no earlybirds.  The funny thing was that when I arrived about 10 minutes early after killing some time trying not to be too early to respect the hosts’ wishes, the sale was flooded with people!  I was a bit frustrated.  By the time I got there, there was mostly just shovelware left.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s false advertising.  The only thing I managed to snag that was worthwhile was a Gameboy Advance SP charging cord to replace the 3DS cord that came with my unit by accident.  Check!

Annoyed, I decided to randomly drive around the town in various neighbourhoods to see if there were any yard sales to quell my aching heart.  Surprisingly, I found a lot of different sales today and made out pretty well.  Along with what’s pictured below, I also picked up a GameCube console and one controller (no cords) for $20, a Tails doll, and a pack of awesome 80s Ninja Turtles playing cards.

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The majority of these games came from the lady that sold me the GameCube.  I was super excited to get the two Harvest Moon games in excellent shape (of the three GC games pictured, only Magical Melody came with its manual.)  I’ve been seeing the price of the GC Harvest Moon games going up and up and had been lamenting over a missed opportunity to buy Magical Melody for $10 not all that long ago, so I’m glad this worked out.  When I first picked up the GC games and the console today, I had gone on to other ventures before realizing that no power/AV cords had been included.  It was an amateur mistake, but truthfully, I was distracted by my excitement at finally being successful at haggling… I got the lady down from $50 to $30 by walking away!  She had been super good to deal with, so I didn’t see any harm in going back and inquiring about the missing cords.  She was actually pretty embarrassed and felt bad about not knowing about the power cord, etc. (she thought the controller was the hookup), so she invited me into the house to look with her.  As she was rummaging through the cupboard under her television trying to find the cords, I noticed she had the two SNES games as well as the N64 game there and inquired if she was interested in selling them.  She said yes, and for $1 each!  So, what I’ve found is that when it rains Mario Kart, it also pours Mario Kart.  This is the third Mario Kart 64 cartridge I’ve run into in the past few weeks!  You’ll also notice that there’s a terrifying Ronald McDonald sticker on it.  I’m hesitant to remove it because it’s just so awesomely horrible.  The other games I got from her by surprise were Lagoon and Super Bonk.

The two Playstation 1 games came from an entirely different yard sale.  I got there right before another guy who was looking at games but managed to snag the Spyro game as well as Croc 2.  I found the strategy guide for Croc 2 recently, so I thought it’d be appropriate to also own the game.  The seller had some other PS1 games like Frogger 2 and Croc as well as Crash Team Racing, but the discs were in mediocre shape and were missing manuals and disc art in some cases.  I certainly wasn’t itching to own any of them, so I was happy to leave them there for someone else.

I am surprised I’m still awake since we’re pushing 9:30 p.m. here, and I’ve been up since around 5:00 a.m.  I’m considering doing some yard sale-ing locally here tomorrow, but two early weekend mornings just feels like torture.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.  Thanks for reading!

-GG

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