Blog Rolling

This is the first entry of our TravelinFam blog -- it's primary purpose to update family and friends about our journey to California. Of course, we don't leave for 6 more weeks, but I wanted to get the blog set-up and give it a test run.

We have been busy packing and selling and giving things away, and we are starting to get down to the end of all that. Of course, we still have to pack things which we need to leave out because we will be using them over the next several weeks, but we have about 50 boxes packed already. And the movers will pack breakable things, so we are getting down there.

It has been a difficult but good process. In a way, we were lucky to have so much time to prepare, although that has led it to seem endless in some ways. It has been interesting to see, as we sell off various items, just how crazy everything is. Some things, which I considered to be really nice, we had trouble giving away or got very little for (e.g. we had to finally take $350 for our treadmill which we origianlly paid $2300 for), and other things surprised the living daylights out of me in a positive way.

The current surprise is a promotional display piece from the original Star Wars movie -- what they call a "Lobby Card", which was used to promote the movie in theaters. We guessed that it should be worth something, but with so much on our plates, we didn't really take time to look into it, and we asked just $15 for it when we held our moving sale a few weeks ago.

Not a soul was interested. On day two of our moving sale, we slashed prices by 50%, so we were asking just $7.50 for the Star Wars piece. Not a soul was interested. By the end of that day, we were basically offering things for free to people, just to get rid of them. Still no takers. So the Star Wars item just has been sitting on our mantle awaiting its fate.

Yesterday, for the first time, I had enough time to go on-line and try to research such items. While I still don't have a final outcome, what I found was that some original Star Wars promotional items seem to sell for hundreds (and in some cases thousands!) of dollars. I sent out about a dozen e-mails to dealers to see what they would offer me, and, though I've only heard back from two, it is clear that I should be able to sell it for at least $100-200. And, of course, now that I know it's worth something, I think I should get significantly more for the item that a few days ago I couldn't give away!