Four wheels, as promised.
It is a 2007 Club Car: forty-eight volts, four seats, a set of batteries less than a year old, and a charger in the box. It runs, it drives, and the body, seats, and tires are all in good shape. Bidding opens at $2,000 against a value of $3,500.
Here is the part that is not in the specifications. For years, that cart has been the thing that carries people from the far end of the Heart of Life parking lot to the front door — grandparents, anybody on crutches, anybody who turned up in the rain. If you have been to the Harrisonville campus on a Sunday morning, there is a fair chance you have ridden in it. It is retiring now, and on the way out it is going to turn into groceries, school fees, and beds.
Sold as-is, and you will need to arrange to haul it home. Everything else about it is straightforward.
A necklace with a July birthday
This one is thirty dollars and it is the item I would point at if somebody asked what this auction is actually about.
It is a Kendra Scott Elisa pendant — the design that more or less made her name — set with a Red Illusion stone in fourteen-karat gold-plated brass. The stone was chosen on purpose, to match the red we use for everything we make.
Then somebody noticed the rest of it. Red Illusion is Kendra Scott’s rendering of the ruby, which is July’s birthstone. July is the birth month of the young man this whole thing is named for. Nobody planned that. It simply turned out that way, which is the sort of thing that happens often enough around here that we have stopped being surprised by it and have not stopped noticing.
There is a second Kendra Scott piece in the catalog too, a Courtney paperclip chain, opening at twenty-five dollars. And if you would rather do the choosing yourself, there is a gorjana gift card in there worth $250, opening at $100.
Two trips, and both of them bend to fit you
Alaska by Sea opens at $4,890: seven days aboard the Island Princess on the Voyage of the Glaciers route, a balcony stateroom for two, a May departure when the snow is still down on the peaks, a thousand dollars toward your flights, and all the taxes and port fees covered.
What makes it worth more than the sum of those parts is Glacier Bay itself. The park limits how many ships are permitted inside, and Princess holds access that puts you in the park rather than somewhere near it. If you have ever heard someone try to describe a wall of blue ice shearing off into the water and give up halfway through — that is the thing this package is built around. It is also a one-way itinerary rather than a round trip, so you see twice the coastline and finish somewhere other than where you started.
Three Nights in a Storybook Village opens at $1,570, and it is the most peculiar, most charming thing in this catalog. Ancient Lore Village sits in the hills outside Knoxville, where winding paths lead past gardens to dwellings that look like they grew there on their own. The package puts you in the Fairy Family Cottage for three nights: a round purple door, chandeliers and exposed beams, a fairy figurine tucked into a wall nook, a loft with a round window, and a shower tiled in soft rose. It sleeps four. Children come apart over it. So, quietly, do most adults.
The Village Discovery Package comes with it — self-guided audio tours, the hiking trails, and games scattered across the property from cornhole to jumbo Jenga to yard dice. Ijams Nature Center is ten minutes away, three hundred acres along the Tennessee River, and dogs are welcome there, which is the short answer to the question in the listing title.
Here is the part people miss about both of these: neither one is take-it-as-printed. Book with Bay will rebuild either trip around you. A different month. A higher deck or a mini-suite instead of an assigned stateroom. An extra night. Another couple along. At the Village you can trade the cottage for something else entirely — an Elven Treehouse up among the branches, a villa whose bedroom is finished in fourteen layers of plaster to look like a birch forest, or a bungalow that sleeps eight and sits nineteen feet underground beneath a living roof that reblooms every spring. You cover the difference in cost; she does the arranging.
You have twenty-four months to travel on the Alaska package and twelve on the Village, and the Village holds its rates steady all year, weekends included.
Both of these were voted on by you back in August, which means somebody reading this is partly responsible for them being in the catalog at all.
For the ones who keep the television on in the fall
Three of the strongest lots in the building are sitting in this section, and two of them are signatures.
The Bobby Witt Jr. bat is a Homewood Bat Company BW7 Maple Pro — a real game-model bat, thirty-three and a half inches, thirty-one and a half ounces, Royals-blue barrel, signature in silver, authentication hologram attached. It is not represented as game-used. It opens at $550.
The Andy Reid and Steve Spagnuolo photograph is dual-autographed, both signatures in silver ink across a sideline shot of the two of them in red. It is matted in Chiefs red, framed in black, with an engraved nameplate, and it runs about twenty by sixteen inches before the frame. It opens at $450.
And there are two tickets to the Chiefs and the Cardinals at Arrowhead on Sunday, November 22, noon kickoff — section 323, row 21, seats 9 and 10, together. Those came to us from ECA, along with a good deal more that you will read about in a minute. They open at $125.
If you would rather your memorabilia came with strings on it, an all new autographed Taylor Swift guitar is in the catalog as well, celebrating her new title as Mrs. Kelce, JSA authenticated, opening at $980.
Somebody’s garage is about to have a very good November
ECA did not stop at football tickets. There are nine separate Milwaukee cordless lots in this catalog, and together they amount to the kind of haul that normally takes a person a decade of birthdays to assemble:
- Hammer drill and impact driver combo — opens at $150
- Reciprocating saw and multi-tool bundle — opens at $150
- Circular saw and grinder — opens at $190
- Chainsaw kit, sixteen-inch heavy duty — opens at $225
- Cordless leaf blower — opens at $150
- Pruning saw kit with battery — opens at $100
- Rolling tool box — opens at $60
- Two high-powered fans— $90 each. Yes, two. If you have ever tried to dry a basement or move air through a shop, you already know why somebody will want both.
Each lot includes battery and charger. We are grateful to ECA for all of it, and if you win one of these, we would be glad if you said so publicly.
And three for the freezer
Two bundles from the Parks family farm — a thirteen-pound combo at $75 and a smoker bundle at $60 — and grass-fed ground beef from Circle Bar H Ranch at $140. Unglamorous, genuinely useful, and in our experience they go fast.
One more thing while you are here
The 50/50 raffle runs alongside the auction, and it works the way it sounds: half the pot goes home with one person and half goes to the children. Tickets are five dollars, or five for twenty. Unlike the auction, every ticket somebody else buys makes the prize bigger for you too, which makes it the one thing on this page you have a selfish reason to tell your friends about. givebutter.com/NICRaffle26
What to do now
Bidding opens Sunday, October 25, at 6:00 PM, and closes on the evening of November 8. Between now and Sunday you can browse the whole catalog, build a watch list, and set up your account so you are not fumbling with a password at six o’clock on Sunday night.
There are 121 items up there now. Go have a look at what you are up against.
