This past weekend I spotted an advert for “Canada’s Longest Yard Sale” in the local paper. The ad featured a little map that outlined a route around the east side of the city which totalled 250 kms in length. As it happened however, this past weekend was the same weekend my wife had picked for her own garage sale, combined with her mother and aunt so a family day out garage sale’ing was out of the question. Luckily, my father-in-law - being the obliging sort that he is, agreed to do some ‘garaging’ with my son and I in the morning. For those who don’t know what garage sale’ing is like with a 5 1/2 year old, it goes like this. You plan for 8am, leave by 9am, get roped into brekkie at McDonalds and actually START the garage sale run around 10:00am. That’s LONG after the Hutterites came and went at our own garage sale. I believe I was only just getting out of bed when the large van load of Hutterite women were deposited on our lawn, somewhere around 7:30 am.

Anyhoo, by the time we were finished at McDonalds it was only about an hour and a half before we were to bring lunch home. Clearly not nearly enough time to be driving around outside city limits poking at garage sales. Instead we stayed at our end of the city, catching any garage sale which had a sign posted.

At one such sale, we pulled up where I spotted a rabbit hopping around someones front yard. I told my son about it, and he promptly ran over to it while I caught the rabbits life history from its owner. One minute I’m sitting in the car, the next minute I’m being educated on the wonders of potty training rabbits - of which this one was now a very rickety 9 years. Interesting how stopping at the side of the road outside someones house can change ones day isn’t it!

Fast-forward to 3:00pm

We’ve finally made it outside the city, hoping to catch a few garage sales before they close up for the day. By now all one can really expect to find at this time of day are the dregs left over by hundreds of others who’ve past through in the last few hours.

We stop for an ice cream (one of which lands in my sons lap) and a run around the park (to dry off). Now it’s time to catch a couple antique shops, then head home. My son has been looking for an old toaster ever since he saw “The Brave Little Toaster” movie. So far we’ve yet to find one….

At the last antique shop, we walk in and marvel at all the old items for sale. They had everything from coke & pepsi bottles, to antique toys to furnature etc etc. We all browse for about a half hour when I went up to the man at the counter - knowing full well how it may turn out as my last encounter with that man at the flea market (a few blogs back).

Me: “Excuse me, do you ever come across any HP Sauce items?”
Dealer: “Pardon me?”
Me: “Old HP Sauce bottles, adverts & such.”
Dealer: “Why are you looking for old HP Sauce things?” <—What is with this ’standard’ response??
Me: “I collect them.” *He doesn’t need to know any more than this at this point*
Dealer: *gets out of his chair and walks over to an area which I’d only finished browsing through.*
Dealer: “Here you go.” *He passes a tiny clear glass bottle with ‘H.P. Sauce’ etched in the glass*
Me: *shocked look on my face*
Dealer: “You didn’t think I had any did you?”

It turns out, that several years ago when the city’s new ultra high tech virology lab was being built, this guy had pestered some of the guards to let him on the construction site so he could rummage around in the dirt. Apparently they refused him entrance, so he went back a couple nights later and under the cover of darkness he snuck in and collected a couple hundred “items”. My little bottle being one of them. As it turns out, the buildings foundation was poured the very next day.

The bottle itself is clear glass and measures only 9 centimeters in height and 2 1/2 centimeters wide. The dealer tells me it dates from sometime in the 1910’s.

Once I’ve done some additional research, I intend on photographing this, and my other larger bottle which I’ll place in the history section one complete.

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