Today is day one of the three-day, 300-mile-long garage sale that is Nebraska’s Junk Jaunt. This year’s event is the sixth run each year by the Loup Rivers Scenic Byway Committee of the Loup Basin Resource Conservation and Development Council (better known as the RC&D), and as I wrote last year, it’s no longer a new thing.

Last year’s Junk Jaunt drew 450 vendors in 31 communities, with an estimated 20,000 shoppers from 32 states stopping in along and around Nebraska highways 11, 91 and 2 north and west of Grand Island. There aren’t many events in this area that draw 20,000 people, which makes the Junk Jaunt one of Central Nebraska’s rather unheralded tourism success stories.

The secret to the Junk Jaunt’s success (besides the relentless work put in by organizers like Peggy Haskell) is that it links up dozens of mostly tiny towns to create something with a critical mass of value. In other words, the whole of Junk Jaunt is more than the sum of its parts.

That’s the beauty of an event like the Junk Jaunt: To participate, each community essentially only has to produce a community-wide garage sale — with a little more top-down coordination, of course. If that town were to produce a community-wide garage sale by itself, it would probably draw a good crowd from inside its own city limits, but few people outside of the area and certainly not thousands of people in general. But if it does the same thing as part of the Junk Jaunt, it gets to draw from a crowd of tens of thousands coming through its area specifically to shop and spend money. It’s a case where the coordinating work by the Byways Committee can turn a bunch of small community garage sales into a major regional tourism draw.

Whenever I talk with tourism experts from around the state, they tout the importance of thinking regionally to attract visitors. On their own, those experts say, small towns simply don’t have enough to make visitors’ time there worth the time it takes to get there and back. But when they organize and market together regionally, they can reach that critical mass of tourism attractions that could be enough to lure visitors.

For example, one town might have a beautiful little cafe that would be perfect for lunch, but it wouldn’t be enough to draw a group of friends out from Lincoln just to eat. But when those friends know they could stop before lunch at a huge antique store in the next town over and visit a state historical park in yet another nearby town, that’s much more worthy of a day out.

And that’s what the Junk Jaunt does well — it harnesses the energy of dozens of small towns working together (many of them largely doing something they would have done at some point during the year anyway) to create new value for the area’s tourism business. It appears to be a model others would do well to follow.