The Impala Kid’s Garage

We traveled to the home land on Saturday and Sunday to see our parents. Where’s the home land?  For me, it’s Flatwoods, KY, about 10 miles from Ashland, KY.  My wife’s family is living in Westwood, which is a suburb so to speak of Ashland. 

We stopped off at the Cannonsburg Flea Market, which was a lot of fun, while my wife attended a baby shower (durn babies get so dirty!).

Items at the flea market ranged from copyright violating logo sweatshirts to a trombone to a fiberglass life-size statue of a horse, and all sorts of junk in between.  There were several CB radios (remember those?), shotguns, and more used books and VCR tapes than you could ever read or watch in a lifetime.

Later in the weekend, we visited the flea market in Russell, right in front of AK Steel (formerly ARMCO, pronounced ARM-a-CO by some locals).

There was something there for just about everyone… mostly junk.  One place had some knives supposedly made out of Damascus steel with large price tags, but I wonder if they were really Damascus steel or just someone making them up in a garage somewhere and acid-etching them to look like they were.

I only spent $3.00 at both places.  I got away cheap.

My wife and I also drove through downtown Ashland, trying to remember what stores were where back when we lived there.

We discovered that the old Steckler’s men’s clothing store was formerly the location of the Second National Bank.  I don’t recall the name of that bank nowadays, but it sits at the opposite end of the same block.

We also went up and saw the bare, empty lot where the Bluegrass Restaurant used to sit.  We pulled into the lot and parked the car briefly in the 2nd slot (lines were still were painted on the asphalt), where we met back in 1976.   It was hard to believe it wasn’t there any longer.