Red Level, Alabama Picker's Honey Hole

I love me some estate sales!  Well, I love me some vintage hoarded estate sales.
A friend of mine and I took a road trip to Red Level, Alabama to check out a nationally featured sale called the "Picker's Honey Hole".

Here are few pics of one barn on the 54 acre hunk of land:

Apparently there were at least a hundred of these old metal signs.

We were not able to make it for 'rope drop' but arrived just 2 hours after it started.  We heard from other people that it was pure madness earlier.  Folks grabbing things out of others piles, and almost all of the signs were sold by the time we arrived.  The people who owned all of this stuff had been pickers themselves and auction fanatics.  Everything in this place was awesome and old.

Inside the house.

I took this photo right before we left so the cupboard is pretty bare, but it was full of vintage cookie containers.

A wall full of wall pockets.

Lots of metal containers...

and lunch boxes on the other side.  These folks didn't have one of everything, they had 50.
Under the double car cover were about 100 storage totes full of items that the owners had collected and wrapped in paper.

In the primary barn I came across this dusty old Pee Wee.  He was sharing the basket with an Alf doll.

It was quite the adventure.  The road leading up to the house was muddy red clay dirt.  We had to park my car about a half mile away and walk.  My friend spent her entire time in the primary barn where everything was coated in dirt and/or rat 'material'.  She dug around the entire place and even discovered it had an attic which she found a way to shimmy up into. Under a pile of, let's call it 'debris', she found me a 6 foot aluminum Christmas tree with it's box!
When I went to check out I was trying to be casual about it but when I said I had a Christmas tree the worker was all elated ...but then told me he couldn't sell me the tree because it was the one thing the family had wanted but didn't know where it was.  I was super bummed.  However, karma did repay us on finding the tree.  A guy was leaving out as we were and we got to hitch a ride on the back of his pick up truck back to my car.
The trip home was also an adventure.  We wound up getting lost because of the lack of street signs and my friend's phone with the decent gps had gone dead.  She had been using her phone as a flashlight out in the barn.  We were driving and driving and she says "We haven't seen enough cotton fields..."  There had been nothing but cotton on the trip there. We pulled off the road and discovered we were in Florala, Al...not on the way home.  We had to charge her phone at a gas station in an outside outlet right next to the trash can.  I went inside to buy us a bag of Lance potato chips and got to talking with the lady at the register.  She asked me which way we had come from, which I responded "both!".  She then started telling me how to get home, which I was only half listening to because I knew I would not remember.  But it turned out to be only 3 turns for the entire trip to get home so I wrote them down and it was smooth sailing at that point.
In the end we both really had a fun time, even with all the mishaps.
So, what did I get at the sale?!
That's the next post!