Not All That Glitters is….. (01-31-14)

….Gold….or crystal, for that matter.

Some of the people in our group enjoy panning for gold and spent a fair amount of time panning through the mud, looking for the stuff that glitters.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, they didn’t find any, but I’m sure they had fun looking and teaching other people how to do it.

Meanwhile, Paul and I made two trips to Crystal Mountain, looking for…crystals.  The first day we went it was pretty cloudy so we decided we needed to go back a second time, in case it was the cloud cover that was causing us to not find anything.

The views from Crystal Hill are pretty nice and the weather was perfect.

Searching for crystals reminds me of searching for sea glass- You are constantly looking down, checking for anything that glints in the sunshine. At Crystal Hill, you’re not allowed to dig for them, you can only take what you can see sitting on the surface.

In the end, we did find a few nice pieces- two that are pretty good size.

In addition to all the fun, of course we have the usual chores to do.

  It was time to move to a new spot when it was time to empty our tanks.  The line can be quite long so we kept an eye on it and timed it so we had a short wait.  Exciting, eh? We did have a little excitement though.

While we were putting fresh water in our tank a woman told us she had just lost her little dog, who had jumped out of her rig.  I got out the binoculars to start searching, and called our friends who were still nearby and they came out to help search.  About 40 minutes later the dog was found and everyone was happy again.

 

The laundry piled up to the point where we made a trip into town to get it done.  It was a large Laundromat, with about 50 dryers, so several women got the brilliant idea of writing down which dryers their clothes were in.  Apparently they had no paper, because they all wrote the numbers on their hands.  Too funny. (Hey, we’re easily entertained)

With not much TV available, Paul was running out of reading material, so we went on the hunt for more books by one of our favorite authors.  We went to several book stores, then ended up at this place.  This is a famous bookstore, but we’ve never been here before, nor did we realize what it was until we got out of the truck.  See, the man who runs this bookstore is a nudist- and he wears only what the town requires of him, which apparently, is a sock.

I say apparently because we happened to show up on a day when the store was closed.  Oh well.