If you live in the states of North Carolina or Tennessee, there’s a good chance that you’ll have heard of McKay’s. Much beloved by its customers, this store sells and trades books, audio-video, and so much more.

To celebrate their 50th anniversary, McKay’s offered prizes to anyone who visited two or more of their stores on July 9th. If you visited all five, they’d give you $800 of store credit and (as long as supplies lasted) other doodads, like shirts and mugs. Each store would stamp your ‘passport’ to confirm that you had visited.

$800 to buy books? That sounded GREAT! But given all the trouble involved, I figured that only a few kooks would do it, including me.

Was I ever wrong. THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of kooks would do it, including me.

Here is a quick overview of my ‘Ultimate Road Trip.’

STARTING POINT: 8 AM, Mebane NC

We had to park about a half mile away from the store. These happy people (and several thousand more) had beaten us to the line, and we stood there for three hours. It would have been at least an hour more if one of the employees hadn’t recognized my 12-year old daughter (who was in the store cooling off) and graciously given her a stamped passport.

My daughter darted back to the line and announced this news loudly and happily, handing me the passport right in the middle of the sweaty mob. As all eyes converged on my passport, I felt like a tub of chum chucked into shark-infested waters, and beat a hasty retreat to our next destination.

3-ish PM, Knoxville TN

I bet you thought our next stop would be Winston-Salem. Wrong! Because of the long wait at Mebane, McKay’s gave us a two-for-one and allowed us to skip the Winston store.

We arrived in Knoxville feeling pretty great, but that didn’t last long. I could say a lot about about this stop, but I won’t. Except that the dude who got the job validating passports did an awful job on mine and stamped more ink on the tabletop than my passport. For more detail on the Knoxville stop, check out MADNESS AT MCKAY’s.

6-ish PM, Chattanooga TN

Night and Day when compared to Knoxville. The operation here was run so well and the staff were so chirpy that I have absolutely zero to grouse about. They even looped part of their passport line inside the air-conditioned store, making my daughter very happy. Kudos, Chattanooga!

THE END: Nashville, TN. Enter line at 9-ish PM, exit at 10:30 PM

Exhaustion. Fatigue. Dehydration. Saddle sores. You’d think that after a day like this, everyone would be as friendly as a pack of dragons pouncing on a thieving hobbit. Not so. Instead, there was joking, laughter, and dancing in the Nashville line. And in the end, the big payoff; $500 in store credit handed to us by an employee who – despite suffering through his own grueling day – treated us like victorious warriors returning from an epic quest.

Thank you, McKay’s, for sponsoring this experience! Sure, it wasn’t easy, but for those of us who participated in this once-in-a-lifetime road trip, it will become (for better or worse) an unforgettable event, the ‘Woodstock of 2024.’ If you do a 100-year Road Trip, I doubt I’ll be around, but my daughter vowed she’d do it with her grandkids.

And now that she’s learned the ropes, I guarantee she’ll be ready. Even for Knoxville.