Digging for Diamonds

We arrived in Hope on Tuesday afternoon and figured that we might want to stay for three nights to have a day of rest after two long days of driving, but I paid for only two nights, just in case, since we were staying right next to the highway. Well 6:45 am the next morning we had a rude awakening by a train that blew his whistle for at least 5 minutes. We looked at each other and decided to go digging for diamonds today and head out the next day.

I was so excited to finally go digging for diamonds, I felt like a kid in the candy store. It is about an hour drive to the park and we saw some beautiful flowers along the way. Have you every noticed that you see the most beautiful flowers along the highway where there is no way to stop. I just don't understand why you can't pull over into the breakdown lane to take a picture, but Doug says that it is not safe. Well on this back road I was able to take a picture of these pretty flower.


Well, we arrived at Crater of Diamonds State Park, watched the 10 minute video, got a sifting screen, and were of with my bucket and shovel. I had no idea just how hard the soil actually is. You would think it is pretty soft since you need to sift the soil through the screen, but I was sadly mistaken. I had to break the soil apart with my gardening claw and it still was pretty hard to do. This is me sitting under the umbrella, since it was a pretty hot day in the high 80. Not the best day to go digging.

Doug chose to sit in a comfortable chair in the shade at the outskirts of the field while I was digging in the dirt. I don't give up that easy, so I sat there for about 1 1 /2 hours playing in the dirt.

If my hands would have not been so dirty, I would have taken a picture of him sitting comfortably in the shade. But, I was not the only one that dreamed of finding a diamond.

Well, after 1 1 /2 of digging in dry dirt I decided that this was not the way to go and went on to wet sifting. I found myself a trough, send Doug for some more screens for wet sifting and got myself a bucket of dirt. It is easier to search this way, except that my back was hurting a little bit.

I found a lot more pretty stones that way and we actually found two stones that really looked like diamonds. I tried to take a picture of my "diamonds" and the ones that Doug bought for me at the gift store, but my camera can't zoom in on it enough. If I figure it out, I shall post the pictures later. I was pretty bushed after two hours of hard work, but I truly had a blast.

On the way back to Hope we stopped at this cool junk store in Murfreesboro.

And again, we are starting to see a lot of closed or "going out of business" stores in smaller towns. What a sad site to see.