Ultimate Book Store Road Trip

What could go wrong?

A couple of people have slid into the DMs of my email inbox and Instagram account and asked if I was going to detail the events of our McKay’s book store road trip in which we drove across North Carolina and Tennessee in hopes of getting a shit ton of credit to our favorite used bookstore. Today I am home sick on the couch and thought I’d tell you that tale.

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About two months ago I found out that my favorite used bookstore, McKay’s, was organizing an Amazing Race-style road trip challenge in honor of their 50th birthday. The goal: visit all five locations – Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville in Tennessee and Winston Salem and Mebane in North Carolina – in a single day. 

At the first location you’d receive a passport, and then at each subsequent location visited you’d receive additional prizes including store credit, which works just like gift cards. If you went to all five stores in one day, you’d get $800 in store credit plus swag. Each. For every participant that completed the road trip. 

It didn’t take much convincing for Tucker and I to agree to do it. I wanted the credit for books and he wanted it for music equipment and records. It seemed like a fun way to spend a day and we love road trips, so we started putting a plan together. We already had a trip booked that weekend for our wedding anniversary – we had a stay at the Hotel Genevieve in Louisville arranged, so as soon as we were done with that we’d just head down to North Carolina to Tucker’s parents’ house. The plan was to sleep there, and then drive the hour and a half to start the day in Mebane, N.C. and work our way back to Nashville. This would also give us an additional hour to complete the trip because of the time change. 

The plan was foolproof! We had a cooler packed! I’d made 60 friendship bracelets and we were prepared for a nine hour car ride!

We set out early on the morning of July 9th with great attitudes in tow. We’d arrive just before the first location opened. About an hour into the drive our nerves started getting to us. I’d been excited about this trip for a full month and I was starting to get nervous that something might go wrong. As we got near the first location traffic on the highway started getting slower and slower. Once we turned off the exit we saw cars parked all along the highway and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Fearing the possibility of getting towed, we parked in an actual parking spot in a neighborhood and walked up to find around 2,000 people in line already. It was wrapped around the building three times. We got in line, and for about half an hour the line moved steadily, almost quickly, and we felt some optimism about the whole thing. That optimism was short lived, because pretty soon our line stopped moving. In the thirty minutes we were in line, 3,000 other people arrived and started getting into an intersecting line on the other side of the building, which started moving in our place. We waited in the stopped line for another half hour, and then decided that at the rate we were moving we’d be in line for four or five hours, ultimately not making it to all five locations before the time cutoff anyway. We were already sunburned and we’d left our water in the car. With tears already welling up in my eyes, we decided to go on to the next location and try our luck there. On the way out I spotted some people we recognized from our beloved Saturday morning coffee spot, Matryoshka, and dropped my large bag of friendship bracelets with them. I wasn’t sure if I could handle the disappointment if it was going to be like that all day and was feeling nervous about the whole situation. We exchanged numbers with them, and decided to keep in touch for the rest of the day, and then we walked back to our car a little defeated and headed to Winston. 

I think I cried the entirety of the drive from Mebane to Winston. I was so excited initially and then so sure I was about to be let down. We tried to make plans about what we’d do if we needed to give up, but nothing sounded better than trying to make it to the rest of the bookstores. When we arrived in Winston, we were able to park in the parking lot which was the first good sign. There was a line of about 500 people, and as we made our way to get in the big line a second line opened up just as we were walking past it. Two very nice women coming over from the other line, a mother and daughter, told us to go ahead and get in front of them. This meant there were only about thirty people in line in front of us in this new line. Our new friends told us they were pretty sure we could get stamps for both North Carolina locations at this one, which they’d learned from an official Facebook group. They also let us in on the fact that this event was way bigger than anyone, including the folks at McKay’s, could have imagined. When I got to the front of the line a woman in a birthday hat gave me the road trip passport and my first two stamps. She was very nice. They were out of t-shirts so she gave us each an extra $10 credit. Then she told me she liked my dress and gave me another $10 credit. I wanted to hug her for being so kind to me and for creating the moment where I realized that we had a real shot at getting the grand prize. Instead I just told her thank you and that she’d made my day. We bid the mother daughter duo goodbye and set out to the next store. 

We stopped off at McDonald’s and pulled up the Facebook group which ended up being a treasure trove of information. I texted our friends from the first store everything we knew so far. We checked McKay's instagram accounts, and they officially made a statement that you could complete the road trip with only one of the two North Carolina stamps, which meant that the hoard of people from Mebane and Winston Salem were starting to make their way to the Knoxville location and we were ahead of nearly all of them. We kicked the car into drive, and sped off. 

The drive from Winston to Knoxville was the longest of the day clocking in at about four hours. We spent the time checking the Instagram comments and the Facebook group trying to see what sort of situation we were about to drive into in Knoxville. I checked social media so much that I made myself carsick and gave myself the sinking feeling that comes with staring at screens too much. We realized that everyone who started in Nashville would be arriving in Knoxville at about the same time as everyone who was heading in from NC, as it was the halfway point of each of the logical paths. We prepared mentally for a lot of people at the Knoxville location. When we were about fifteen minutes out, I read reports of people getting turned away by cops. Then, right before the exit, I read some comments about people passing out in the heat. That was all we needed to hear, we made the decision to drive past, and we were so glad we did. As we passed we could see multiple fire trucks and police cars at the bookstore. We knew they’d probably make some sort of exception for the Tennessee locations like they had for the North Carolina stores. We would later learn that the city of Knoxville shut it down because of the number of people passing out from heat exhaustion. They brought the mass casualty unit because they needed to treat so many people for dehydration. Avoiding it altogether was a good call, regardless of the day's prize outcome. 

On the way to Chattanooga I tried to pump the brakes on obsessively checking social media. As we pulled off the exit I felt nauseous again. We had no clue what we were walking up on. I must have succeeded at staying off my phone on that leg of the drive because when we pulled up to the Chattanooga store we were totally in shock. There was no line. There were no tables set up outside. We got princess parking right near the door. We walked right up to the counter. We told the cashier what happened in Knoxville, and she gave us our $50 credit and told us when we got to Nashville they’d give us everything else. She also told us that all the merch at every location had run out. She was really kind, and really assuring. I texted our friends we’d met along the way and told them the news. 

On the drive from Chattanooga to Nashville it started to set in that what had started out as a stressful and anxiety filled day, had ended up being smooth sailing for us. We were out ahead of the Mebane hoard, and as it stood we were on track to make it to Nashville around 6 PM. We felt really, really lucky, but still nervous. We’d gone the whole way, and we only had $60 and $70 each in store credit to show for it. We laughed it off, and realized we’d had fun, and we’d only gotten a little bit of a sunburn at the first location. We were healthy and safe, and whatever was going to happen was going to happen.

When we pulled up to Nashville the line was wrapped halfway around the building, which felt like child's play at that point. In line we made friends with some really nice ladies. One of which was a school teacher who was going to spend her credit on books for her students, the other was a missionary who wanted to spend hers on Bibles. The people in front of me were going to spend all their credit on Funko Pops. The road trip really brought out an array of people, the vast majority of which were very nice and generous. We got to the table and the woman asked me what stamps we were missing. We told her about Knoxville. She took our passports, stamped for Knoxville and Nashville, and gave us each $750 in credit. Then she gave us an additional $80 each in credit because the swag had run out. She bid us congratulations, and then through a big smile asked us to please not go in the store tonight. We thanked her profusely. After the line there was a rotating cast of people taking photos in front of the store. We exchanged photo duties with some teenage girls who were really into fantasy books and had t-shirts to say so, and then we got in our car and drove home book-money rich. 

All in all, we got $900 each in store credit and we have a great story to tell. An estimated 10,000 people came out to participate in the McKay’s 50th Anniversary Road Trip, and they gave out EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS in store credit. My bookshelves were already almost at capacity before, but after several trips I’ve gotten enough books that I had to (finally) buy new bookshelves for my office and I’ve only spent $200 of the credit. The best part? I got to fulfill a childhood fantasy of going on a shopping spree at a bookstore.

Left: Just after we finished the road trip. Right: The sunrise as we began the road trip.

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