Still figuring out the video thing, but here’s what we were able to cobble together from what little we shot on the Vegas trip last month.

We reached Salt Lake City late but with enough time to hit IKEA to pick up a few things for the interior of the bus. With dire predictions of 1-3 feet of snow around Salt Lake City and sleet and snow already falling when we woke up, we skipped many of our thrift shop stops and prioritized the larger of the antique malls. Back on more familiar, older ground, my luck started to change, with a couple of fedora finds. The vintage shops in the area focused more on women’s vintage (with huge selections) and 1970s menswear, but there were a few pieces of vintage kicking around there and the antique malls. There was the usual frustration of 6-3/4 hats (unsellable) and equally unsellable late 1950s-early ’60s suit jackets and overcoats tempting me in lots of the shops. Dodging the forecasted snow in the SLC area and north in Pocatello, we cut west to Twin Falls for the night. Waing early, we drove the last two hours to Boise, where we stumbled upon Ward Hooper Gallery and Vintage Swank, which specializes in the type of vintage clothes that largely make up my own closet. It’s always fun to walk into a place filled with 50-80 year old clothing and be able to recognize exactly who made what without even take it off the hanger. Alex made a major score there, picking up an early 1900s wooden 8×10 bellows camera, a real monster. We hit up a few more antique stores and a couple of thrift shops before reaching the point of critical thrift saturation. Usually we do more sightseeing, more walking through back alleys looking at changes in brickwork and battered neon. This trip we’ve done much too much driving and going from one chain thrift shop to one chain thrift shop, with identical interiors, the same lousy clothes on every rack from one store to the next and seeing the same sprawl. No matter where you go, driving by an Applebees still looks the same.

So on to Pocatello, to recharge at our favorite hotel, the Black Swan Inn Theme Suites. This time we got the Caveman room and what a kitchy roadside treat it was. Back within our 300 mile zone of comfort, we re-traced the footsteps we’ve taken on several other trips through Pocatello and Idaho Falls. We were last in the area in October, and places haven’t had time to fully re-stock, so we saw a lot of the same antiques we’ve passed over before. Still, a tie here, a jacket there, it adds up.

When it’s all laid out, it’s quite a haul, coats, hats, ties, suits, jackets, and the big score, over a hundred deadstock WWII zippers, mostly Talons and Crowns. I’ve been working on shooting and editing for the past 10 hours, I should have the rest of it ready to show you all by tomorrow. I’m also working on editing some of the video we shot along the way. There’s a definite learning curve, and this probably wasn’t the trip to start with, but I think you’ll enjoy it.