An Ultimate McKay’s Road Trip Experience

By: Kaylee Savage-Cutcher 

Last summer – which was the summer of 2024, if you’re in the future – I participated in an event I’ve seen dubbed “Woodstock for book lovers”, better known as the Ultimate McKay’s Road Trip. To celebrate the used bookstore McKay’s 50th birthday, anyone who visited all 5 locations in one day received a main prize of 800 dollars of store credit. That’s an 800 dollar gift card for every individual who completed the challenge. If you carpool and split costs with people, which my group did, it was a really good deal. 

It was difficult, obviously, or they wouldn’t give so much trade credit away for it. The locations were spread across Tennessee and North Carolina, and it was about a nine hour drive from end to end without traffic. Way more people attended than expected, so there was a lot of traffic and crowding at locations. You couldn’t just drop in at each store and leave immediately, either; you had to wait in line to get a stamp in an official booklet each time as proof you had been at that location.  

It went a little bit like this:  

Stop 1: Melbane, NC - We arrived at least an hour before stamps were going to be given out. We thought we would have a good head start, but there was already a line wrapped around the building. It took a couple hours to get through, so we got on the road later than expected.  

Stop 2: Winston-Salem, NC - There was a big crowd, but we got there early enough that it was the quickest stop.  

Stop 3: Knoxville, TN - This was where the trouble started, because people who started on both sides congregated here at about the same time. We had to park pretty far from the store, police were directing traffic, and I saw an ambulance coming to pick up a participant. We had waited four hours, and it was almost our turn to get our stamps – but then the cops shut the location down. They considered it a hazard, and yeah, I understand why. McKays said that anyone could get a substitute stamp at their next location, and rumors started going around that they would start considering four or even three stores as completing the road trip.  

Stop 4: Chattanooga, TN – We figured too many people from Knoxville would come here next, so we skipped it. We were planning to come back after Nashville, and I was personally hoping that we could get credit for it somehow like Knoxville or that four stops would count.  

Stop 5: Nashville, TN – The line was comparable to Melbourne, maybe not bad because of skipping Chattanooga. Still, it was getting later than expected and it set in that we wouldn’t have time to get to Chattanooga before McKay’s closed. My hopes that we could get away with one less stop turned out to be true; the store staff realized that it was pretty much impossible to complete the road trip with how many people participated. We got our 800 dollars each, plus a little extra because they ran out of the other prizes, which totalled to around 2,500 dollars of trade credit.  

It’s been almost a year, and I don’t have much of that trade credit left. It’s hard to stop an English major’s obsessive book collecting and need for textbooks.