Coolest groundscore, kickdown, item you’ve gotten for free/trade?

[Batsy]

What’s the coolest item you’ve gotten for free/trade?

Bonus points if you include a photo.

 

[Batsy]

I’ll go first.

- I have a cool small tactical flashlight that I groundscored outside a donut shop in Berkeley. It has a glass breaker around the rim of the light.

- My friend was kicked down a taxidermy Bufo Alvairus toad coin purse while busking on Haight St. This is the infamous species of toad that produces smokable venom with DMT in it when it gets scared.

- In the coming days, I’m gonna be trading a multimeter in exchange for a mural that my talented friend is gonna paint on my van. Super stoked!

 

[AnotherNerd]

For me, I'm not sure what's the coolest but there was a fancy Bloody Mary with all sorts of veggies in it (a kickdown passed on to me from someone else), a blunt and $5. All in Nola and all just at the right time. They all kept me going when I really needed something to keep my spirits up.

 

[Jimmy Beans]

Groundscore- I drove my roommate down from the mountains into Chico and waited with him at the Amtrak. It was like 4am or so iirc, we got there super early because I didn't want him to miss his train. He and I were both completely broke, I wasn't even sure if I'd have enough gas to make it home back up the hill. On the way down I was trying to coast as much as possible on the downhills to gain speed so that they'd carry me up over the humps just to be super thrifty with my gas. He wasn't going to be able to eat anything on his train ride, we were both just so hobbled.

So we're hanging around at that Amtrak station and I go kickin around the parking lot just out of boredom, lookin at random graffiti and such. On the asphalt at the far end of the parking lot I spotted what looked like money. As I got closer it looked like a larger bill than dollars. It had to be at least a 5 just by appearance from that distance. As I got even closer and my eyes locked in on it I could swear it looked like a hundred dollar bill but then the doubts set in because I'm sure we've all found those stupid fake hundreds before with some sort of advertisement on them so I was like ugh probably one of those as I leaned over to grab it.

Nope, it wasn't a fake. It was a hundred dollar bill and a twenty dollar bill folded up together just laying there in the parking lot. I was so stoked. I gave my roommate the 20 so that he could eat and I kept the 100 for gas and also the assurance that I'd have gas to pick him up again in a few days. I would have hit up a store and broke the hundred and gave him more but his train was almost to the station and there simply wasn't time to.

Kickdowns.. This one isn't amazing or anything but it really counted for a lot at the time. I was about 17 years old hitchhiking with a friend. We were total noobs, it took us four days just to get from Fresno to San Jose lol. We were broke and hungry af. Dumpster diving didn't even cross our minds, we were just dumb kids on the road with no traveling experience. We were sitting outside of a grocery store in the shade pondering our next move. We weren't spanging or anything, we were just chillin. Some random guy walked up and just handed us a ten dollar bill. Back in the 90's you could actually feed two people with ten dollars. We were so fucking grateful for that guy. It was like he just knew somehow.

I don't think I've ever been kicked down an item but I have a short story about seeing an item kicked down that I thought was pretty neat. I was like.. idk 15 or so at the time. My friend Bert really wanted this Joy Division shirt. He insisted that we walk literally all the fucking way across town, probably like 8 miles or so to the record store that had the shirt. So we did, spent hours and hours walking to this store in the hot summer heat for this damn shirt he had to have. Then we walk another 7 miles or so to the Tower District where we hung out in those days.

Ok so.. when I say literally, I mean literally. Literally the fucking moment we reach our final destination in the Tower District, which is the bus stop we used to take over out in front of Blockbuster Video.. some random person is sitting there waiting for the bus. We weren't even there to catch a bus, it was just our hangout. Anyway, this random guy says to Bert "That's a rad shirt!". Bert takes the shirt off and gives it to that guy. I mean I love seeing a nice kickdown and everything but bro.. I coulda just grabbed a shirt from the house and saved us like 15 miles of walking. Bert was fucking dope like that. He always wanted to just see someone else stoked. Many people use the phrase "They were the type of person that would give you the shirt off their back" Bert really was, even if he had to walk 15 miles just to hand it to you.

RIP Bert. He's the Hispanic one, actually wearing another Joy Division shirt in one of the pics here. Side note- The blonde guy caressing Bert & the one with his tongue out is an engineer for Union Pacific. I got 5 of my homies hired on with the railroad, he was the only one who stuck it out.

 

[dubh]

best place to ground score is San Francisco, best so far was a high end computer that was broken that I traded a techie for a nice working computer with monitor for, at the same score there were $300 bluetooth headphones, a couple years behind the times but worked well for 2 years. all kinds of stuff laying around SF, scored a couple bikes there too.

 

[laughingman]

I'm not sure if this counts but I pulled 2 brand new but very broken solar panels from the discard pile at a local solar installer quite some years ago. They took me some time to fix but Are powering my house as we speak. Including the laptop that I'm typing this on. Ive dived any number of things which I love but I think the panels are the ones I use the most.

 

[sleepingbagchaos]

since i'm travelling so many things to be honest (like resources for constructions, gear, clothes, rides^^...) but what felt best for me honestly was the coffee/invitation to a meel people gave me (even though it doesn't sound as cool as maybe the camping hamock or the smartphone... someone gave me)

 

[Joey Garbanzo]

The GI Joes I found at the park when I was little - they were friggin cool and should count, fight me. Haha 🤣

The day I found a $20 dollar bill literally flapping in the breeze in the grass on a day I needed it most. It paid for dinner and a beer.

Today I found a Manfrotto tripod with a pistol grip beside the trashcan on a very busy road. I got kicked down a coffee for doing a good deed yesterday, the guy prepaid for a coffee for me at a local coffee shop. I cashed the coffee in this morning and had a guy challenge me to a fight as he was actively walking away from me while I was trying to enjoy the free cup.

I also got kicked down a caramel chocolate bar today that I then kicked down to a homebum. I gave another one a 1.5L bottle of water after he asked if I had water as I walked by with my dog, he was looking pretty dehydrated when I was talking with him afterwards. I have an appointment tomorrow morning and I'll be walking past the hardware store so I'm going to buy a sillcock for the guy I gave the water to.

**UPDATE - I did get a sillcock key for dude in the park and gave him the run down on how to use it. He was thankful for it and my dog was thankful for the pets she got from him.

 

[TheTexasRoadrunner]

I have a four way silcok water key I found on the side of the highway a few years back and a pocket knife I found out.in atoka a few months back

 

[SuperFluous]

I traded $100 dollars for a baby shit 4 door Volvo that wasn't running, replaced the fuel filter and drove it for four years.
I still miss it

 

[sevedemanos]

i found a full case of deschutes on my birthday in a parking lot once

same day a homie kicked me my first ccg actually. and i dont celebrate my birthday, let alone tell anybody it is

this last winter i found this sick ‘the shining’ hoodie on the ground. right after my two jackets were taken from me by bouncers at a bar in bend. looked like itd seen some mileage

no pics unfortunately. the beer i have since drunk, and the hoodie disposed of for something more work-friendly

 

[Batsy]

Here are a few more:

I found a pretty red plastic Sherlock pipe on the side of a desolate stretch of the I-5 highway in the Central Valley, CA. There were no exits for miles, so my brother and I stopped on the shoulder to piss. I took a closer look at the bush we chose cause I had a gut feeling I was gonna find something cool. Among the trash was the pipe.

I didn’t end up getting to trade my extra multimeter for a mural from my friend, but I did trade an art canvas I made for a mural from another friend. They painted the wall of my van in a beach parking lot in Long Beach, CA. (Photo included) Someone on instagram left a hilarious hate comment on a video of her painting it about how “lady put psychosis all over this nice ass sprinter van” (it’s not even a sprinter), so now my van is named “the psychosis sprinter”. lol

 

[enxomachina]

My first time going down the coast of Oregon, a stranger gave me half an ounce of weed. I smoked a blunt every day for two weeks until I ran out, and that day, in a different town, I was kicked down another half ounce!

 

[enxomachina]

A few months ago I groundscored the Pokemon card: Friends in Galar > Draw 3 Cards. It's one of my favourite finds and I keep it in the window slot of my wallet. Finding a Pokemon card always brightens my day quite a lot!

 

[Tremor]

In NYC I managed to score two perfectly good guitars that were left outsider. They just needed new strings. I found a pair of Made in England Docs that lasted me like 10 years. One time I bought an old lap steel for like 30 bucks in Kingston and then traded it in NY for a banjolele. Man, NYC has metric tuns of perfectly good everything just thrown out! Oh, a fully functional laptop once. The idiot dumped it in the trash because the hard drive was full and it needed a new battery. This city is raining free shit all the time.

 

[Groundscore]

Ground scores are my specialty... My biggest score in cash was $200, four $50 bills folded up nicely just laying on the ground. Just the other day I found a $20 bill on the floor while in the grocery store, and two silver dimes in the reject bin of the CoinStar.

ALWAYS check the reject bin on those; if people overload them, they frequently forget to check it, and I've scooped an entire handful of coins from them, many times. Then I check them for the older 1964 and older dimes and quarters, as those are made of silver. The must weigh more, as they always end up in the reject bin.

The coolest thing I ever got in trade was about 20 years ago... I had helped to renovate a couple of homes for this guy, former rental properties that were trashed, and he was going through a divorce and was trying to sell the places, so he was strapped for cash, but was a coin collector and had a bunch of coins. And he offered to pay me in gold... A one-ounce gold Krugerrand, and 8 European gold coins that totaled another couple of ounces. Back then gold was a little over $400 an ounce, and since he owed me $1500 and he gave me $300 in cash, I took the gold coins for the balance. Later that summer I worked for him again, and we came up with the same basic deal, this time, 12 European coins, totaling about 3 ounces of gold, plus a few hundred bucks in cash for the same amount of work.

I never did sell the coins, I only verified them with a coin shop as being legit, and I put them away in a safety deposit box, along with a bunch of silver coins I had accumulated over the years. Today, just over 20 years later, those six ounces of gold coins are worth close to $14,000. SO glad I took the guy up on that offer all those years ago, as if I had insisted on cash I would have just burned through it.

 

[Scat]

Wow, you all have found some really cool stuff along the way.
Best I've gotten is some nice collapsible dog bowls along trails or some quartz from a stranger.

 

[pcflvly]

I was biking west in Texas and it was cold, with the wind blowing hard out of the north. This was out past Alpine. No shelter from the wind anywhere until finally there were some mesquite by the road. I stopped in their wind shadow and rolled a smoke.

As I was taking the last puff, I noticed a small package the size of business cards laying in the shoulder. I cut through the tape and found the end of an envelope wrapped in a plastic grocery store bag. Inside the envelope were six twenties.

I looked up then and headed my way was another bicyclist. It was a Korean man who didn't speak any English. He was a good man though and he had some whiskey. After we knocked back the shots, he spots the end of the envelope on the ground and I stop him as he reaches for it to tell him what I'd found, all in sign language and pantomime of course. The punchline of the tale was that I gave him one of the bills. (I'd had a hundred dollar kick the day before and was feeling generous)

He had a similar story and had found a bag of weed in Cali so he offers me as much as I like and we split it. Well, it looked like shake with a few pieces of bud in it but later, when I got a closer look at it, found out that it was the best kif I'd ever laid eyes on and it was stony as fuck. I met some Canadians out by the Prada store later and made their day by giving them some.

That groundscore was the most fun but my favorite was a small pocketknife that I found graded into a gravel FS road in Washington in 2020. It's been in my pocket ever since.

 

[Tobiko]

a mountain of soft serve ice cream left behind after a party on grass in a park in portland

quite literally the coolest ground score