6/25/09 - Emerald City

6/25 - After our experience with digging for diamonds on AR earlier in the trip, the kids weren't really looking forward to our emerald excursion today. I almost just skipped it after our disappointing campground experience in the emerald mine area last night, but my mom called and convinced us to at least try it.

I'm so glad she did! We had so much fun at Emerald Hollow Mine. For $5 each, we each got a seat at the sluice table and we also got a big bucket of dirt from the mine that was included in the admission price. Now, I don't know if the buckets were "enhanced" or not, but we found all sorts of pretty rocks. And not teeny, tiny ones either.

I have NO idea why I didn't dress the kids in the "old" clothes that I had bought for them when we were digging for diamonds. What was I thinking? We got plenty dirty, and this red dirt really doesn't wash out. Cheap souvenier, I guess. Ask Tyler sometime about the red dirt that he brought home from vacation as a kid. ;)

Anyway, sluicing was easy. The kids would use a provided hand shovel to scoop some dirt into their screening box.


Then, they'd set their screen into the stream of water and wash the dirt away with their hands and the provided scrub brushes.



Then, following sluicing ettiquite, they'd lift their screens on an angle to see what was left. Even Matthew did some sluicing. He had a lot of fun getting the dirt, washing it, and pulling out the pretty rocks.


Becky's "I'm supposed to smile but I'm really sick of your camera" smile.


The kids really had a great time since they were actually finding stuff this time.


Clockwise from bottom left: Quartz, Rose Quartz, Smokey Quartz


Clockwise from bottom left, with a penny for scale: Green Aventurine, Blue Aventurine, 6 small Garnets, Ruby, Emerald, Sapphire. The small stones on the far right are all Sapphires.


Clockwise from left: Amythest, Mica, and something else. Not sure what it is but the rocks are pretty shades of brown. The Mica crumbles into sparkly flakes, and the dirt at this place in Hiddenite is all glittery with crumbled Mica. It's very pretty in the sunlight.


These are all sapphires. We had run out of our free dirt (ha ha) so we bought 2 more buckets. The man who sold them to us told me not to toss anything at all aside since some of these things really just look like rocks and nothing else. So I kept everything in my screen and when the man came around again he picked all of these out as sapphires. I did some research and he is right, but these rocks are obviously not gem-cutting grade. It would be neat to polish them somehow, although I read that tumbling them isn't going to be the best way of doing it.


The young man who was helping us was very nice. He tossed the following rocks into our screen and said, "Look, you found a Ruby and an Emerald, too!" I think he got a kick out of how excited the kids were about the whole thing. So this one is a Ruby.


And this one is an Emerald.


This is a sapphire with a tiny chip out of the exterior surface. You might be able to see that what is inside is shiny.

6/24/09 - The Beginning of the End?

6/24 - We left Newport this morning and I won't say we were sorry. Waking up several times to shift to a different rocky spot or to scoot yourself back up after having slid down in the night doesn't lead to a restful night.

This may have caused some of the beginnings of homesickness as well, since I started to hear from Hannah that she missed her bed at home.

Anyway, on our way to Hiddenite, NC, which was only a few hours away, we stopped at the Catawba Science Center in Hickory, NC. We had a great time! The center was just big enough to keep the kids busy, but small enough that they weren't overwhelmed.

When I told them where we were going, they were so excited! They brought in notebooks and pencils so that they could take notes on their research.


The first exhibit we saw was a mock riverbed. Along one wall were tanks with fish and snakes, lizards, etc. And along the other wall was a tank where kids could touch turtles.


Clara really loved this until the turtle she was petting nipped her on the finger!

The next exhibit was similar but had a mock ocean instead. There was a tank where the kids could touch small rays in this room. Matthew found an eel that he got a kick out of.


In the next room there were exhibits relating to motion.
Matthew found a car where he could experiment with how the size of the circle you drive on affects how many rotations your tires make if your speed stays constant.

Mostly he just wanted to play with the car, but I think he made amazing strides in his physics knowledge today.

The older girls were really good about reading the information posted about each experiment instead of just playing. Of course, I think that just playing with the stuff is a way to learn also, but I think that Hannah and Clara really got a lot out of it because they were able to read and follow along. Here they are on the "human centrifuge."



Hmmm....
Getting to ride the Teacups at DisneyWorld ... $3000
Getting to ride the Human Centrifuge at Catawba Science Center ... $18
I may have to rethink my love of Disney!

The kids explored lots of motion experiments.



Then we went into the room about space exploration. Clara enjoyed making a dirt devil similar to the ones seen on Mars.


The next section was centered around a swamp theme. The kids really like this part of the science center.


We also saw a baby raccoon, baby skunk, lots of baby alligators, snakes, bats, birds, fish, possum and more. It was pretty neat.

The last part focused on the effects of force on motion. They had a set of chairs where you could use a rope pulley system to pull your chair up into the air. There was a bike you could ride to try to power different things. There was a lot more - the kids and I had a great time.

How hard does one have to roll a golf ball on a track to get it to the end of this set of hills?


Lastly, we found a chair designed to help you feel the difference in spinning speed if you have your arms and legs out compared to if you pull them close to your body. Well, Matthew didn't get that part but he did love to spin in the chair!

Clara, though, told me that this must be why ice skaters hold their arms close to their bodies when they spin, so that they could go faster. DisneyWorld never taught her anything like that!

We left the Science Center refreshed and with some neat things to talk about in the car on our way to the campground in Hiddenite.

When we got to the campground, things kind of fell apart. This was not a KOA campground, and while they did have a pool and a little petting zoo in easy viewing distance, I could not find the office to check in. We went around the camp several times in the van and finally I pulled to a stop in front of the bath house to get out and look around. I thought maybe the office was in the same building since it looked like it had several rooms. The kids stayed in the car with the a/c. I can't blame them.

I walked into the bathroom just out of curiosity and I honestly don't think I have ever been more disgusted. The walls didn't come all the way down to the ground - they were like the walls of a stall? Well, like an old bath house, I guess. And no door to the room - just an entryway that turned once for privacy like some public bathrooms are that you find in stores or restaurants. So, there was absolutely NO way to even begin to keep out flies and other bugs. I opened the door to one of the toilet stalls and there were at least 30 flies inside and that is not an exaggeration. The toilets had black mildew/mold growing all along the bottoms and up the bottom part of the commode. It was just so, so gross.

So I left the bathroom and went across to the "laundry" room. Everything in this room was covered in a layer of thick dust, and there were huge cobwebs in the corners of the room which were also covered in dust. The window was propped open by a big hardcover book, also covered in dust. Now, maybe dust just coats stuff here faster than I'm used to, but nothing in this room looked like it had been used in a month or more. There was a checker board on the table and several paperback books, newspapers, magazines, etc. I didn't even go inside the room.

I started heading back to the car (it was right there - I could see it the whole time I was gone), thinking that there was just no way we could stay there. You couldn't pay me to sit on one of those toilets, let alone let one of the kids. But I had already made a reservation and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be charged for not staying, so I needed to find the office!

An old man dressed in nothing but shorts approached me, so I asked him if he knew where the office was, and he had to think for a minute. Then he pointed me towards a man on a lawnmower and told me that this man was the owner and he should be able to help me. So I asked the lawnmower-man where the office was and he pointed me towards a mobile home down the road a ways.

We pulled up to the trailer and lawnmower-man met us there, saying he thought his wife was home to help us but that she was out in the camp. I told him that we had reservations but that I was concerned about the bathrooms and that we weren't going to be able to stay. I felt bad, because I'm sure they needed our money. And I'm not normally a wimp in this way - I mean we had a lousy site at Newport but at least the bathrooms were clean there.

Luckily this man was very understanding and even told me that they've been concerned with the bathrooms for a while, too, but haven't been able to come up with a suitable (and I think he meant affordable) solution. I hope they are able to fix them sometime soon - it looked like a relatively nice place otherwise. They had lots of RV campers there and their rates were great.

Here's something that I don't understand about (some) people who live in the country. If you were working on a job, say ... fixing your fence, and you had your lumber and other supplies loaded in the back of your truck, and then your truck broke down along the way, why would you just leave the truck right there for the next 20 or 30 years and not even bother to unload the lumber and stuff from the back of it?! We passed a truck on the side of the dirt road leading to the campground that was clearly *old* considering the model of it, the amount of rust, and the fact that it had brush growing all around it and a tree growing through the engine. And yet it was still carrying its old and decaying load of lumber.

I just don't understand. I saw all sorts of things like this in both Tennessee and North Carolina. I saw a carport that had long ago collapsed onto what looked like 2 cars from the 70's. I think if I was a vintage car collector/restorer, I would just drive around the country roads in Tennessee and offer to buy the junk ones that are just sitting outside of people's barns. I can't tell you how many cool, old, discarded cars I saw just rusting to nothingness on people's property. I guess car restorers probably want ones that are in better shape, though. Still - what a waste.

Anyway, I called my mom and asked for help finding a hotel for the night. I'm so glad that she and my dad had offered us, earlier that day, a stay in a hotel for my birthday which was coming up soon. At the time, I had told them that I'd take a rain check in case we needed it later in the trip, but once I saw the bathrooms at this place, I new we needed the hotel now instead of later.

Mom helped us find a nice Hampton Inn nearby. It was a real luxury to take showers and not having to try to keep your clothes dry while you're putting them on in a wet shower stall afterwards. Or keep your son from yanking open the shower curtain while you're standing inside naked. And sleeping in a real bed was definitely a treat!! So thank you so much, you guys!