James Richter, long-distance bargain hunter.
redbankgreen covered a fair amount of ground Saturday, but we kept hearing about a guy who’d really clocked some miles for the Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale.
Word was he’d traveled 140 miles from Kingston, NY. Naturally, we wanted to meet him, but we seemed always to be one step behind him.
Finally, around noon, we crossed paths on the West Side with a shopper, who seeing our camera, told us he and his wife had traveled two hours, from Kingston, NY, for the event.
"What is that, about 140 miles?" we asked.
"Exactly!" he said, his eyes wide, and we knew we’d found our man.
His name is James Richter, and he told us he’d learned about the event a couple of months back when he Googled “townwide yard sale” and “New York” and one of the first hits that came up was an article about the Red Bank sale.
It puzzled him. Then the same thing happened when he tried a few weeks later. His curiosity was peaked. So he dove into this microsite, and discovered that this was an event he didn’t want to miss.
So Saturday at 5:40a, Richter and his missus hit the road, arriving here by 7:30 — 90 minutes before the advertised start of the event, but what the hey. They weren’t disappointed; soon, they were loading purchases into their car.
Richter told us something he wouldn’t have told the sellers in advance — that he’s a dealer back at home. But he wanted everyone who participated to know that he gave the event a big thumbs-up.
For one thing, he was impressed by the hospitality he encountered. When he asked a homeowner where he and his wife might find a bathroom, the seller told him he’d be better off using the one in her house than going to look for one.
“We should be good for another five hours after that,” he said.
And then there were the bargains.
“It was very satisfactory,” Richter said. “Just look into the back of my car and you’ll say, yeah it must have been.”
We did, and his vehicle was pretty well loaded to the gunwales for the return trip.
Then Richter gave redbankgreenman a bear hug.
