6/21/09 - In and Out of Hurricane Mills, TN

6/21/09 - I woke up early this morning and watched the sky lighten up bit by bit through our tent screen. With no rain on the horizon, we took the rain fly off the tent so that we'd have a better breeze overnight since the heat and humidity were stifling. It did cool off a bit in the night so by morning it was comfortable.




Turns out that early morning diffused tent light is awesome for portraits. Too bad the kids were asleep.





When the kids woke up, we got the tent taken down and everything packed up so that we could head to our next campsite. Along the way, we stopped at the World's Fair Park in Knoxville, TN. This is where the famous Sunsphere is located.

Contrary to an episode of The Simpsons I saw, there are no wigs in sight! I bet you could fit a lot of them inside the sphere, though, if you wanted to.

Seriously, though, it's really neat the way that each gold panel reflects a different part of the park. Very artistic.


There was also a splash fountain at this park where the kids could play. It was a great way to cool off since it was another scorching hot day.

6/20/09 - "I'm Going To Graceland, Graceland ... Memphis, TN"

Well, not really to Graceland, unlike Paul Simon's song lyrics, but we did make a stop in Memphis, TN today on our way to our campground in Hurricane Mills, TN. Grandma and Papa followed along since Memphis is only a few hours' drive to their home in MO.

The plan was to eat at Rendezvous and then explore the Mud Island River Walk. So we headed to the Rendezvous for lunch. Mmm... barbecue!



Rendezvous is located in an alley just a few blocks from the Mississippi River, so we parked in a garage and walked. I'm sure we looked very touristy with our cameras and maps out, but at least we didn't end up having to pay some guy on the street for directions like the family walking ahead of us.





Anyway, we got in and got a table with no wait even though it was busy. They have a lot of seating - it's deceiving looking at this place from the outside. The menus are right on the table underneath a sheet of glass and they're pretty straight forward - mostly barbecue although you can get a few other things (but why would you?!)



The kids were hungry! Becky, sporting her handmade-with-pipe-cleaners headgear, had her bottle of extra BBQ sauce ready to go.


The food was heavenly! Here is a picture of the barbecue beef brisket that I ordered:


I was going to try to buy a bottle of their famous sauce to bring home to Tyler, but I figured it was just one more thing to try to carry and in a glass bottle no less. So maybe we'll order some online instead when we get home.

When we were done eating, we headed outside towards the river. It was just so hot that we decided that we would skip the River Walk this time, especially since it was getting late and the kids and I had a couple of hours yet to drive to our campground. So we headed back to our car instead.

Along the way, the kids were fascinated by the horse and carriages that were driving by. I messed up my white balance on this shot, so you get to see it in black and white:


Matthew stopped to show us the car he likes to carry in his pocket. He loves this car!


And, one last pic from this day. This just goes to show that it doesn't make any difference at all where you are, kids will always fight over the elevator buttons.


Or maybe it's just my kids.

6/19/09 - Swimming at CDSP

After lunch, we went to the swimming pool/water park that is on the grounds of Crater of Diamonds State Park. It was really nice - 3 feet max depth, 3 water slides, a zero-entry section, and adequately monitored by life guards which always helps.

While Grandma and I took the kids swimming, Papa went back out to the field to try again to find a diamond. I think he caught the rock-hounding bug!

Anyway, the kids had a great time cooling off in the water. Even Matthew got really brave and actually went into the water instead of just standing at the edge getting his feet wet. The lure was a steering wheel mounted on the structure in the middle of the pool. He played on it almost the entire time, therefore I was there almost the entire time as well.



Becky spent the entire time going down the little water slide on the center structure as well. Up and down, up and down - her energy was boundless.

Hannah and Clara spent a great deal of time going down the bigger water slides nearby, peppered with bouts of wandering around the pool trying to find new playmates and best friends forever even though they never even exchanged names.





We had a great time and stayed till the pool closed at 6 p.m. We went to the local grocery store and picked up some pork cutlets, broccoli, carrots, and BBQ beans for supper. We started a fire the best we could and waited for the wood to burn down into coals so that we could cook the meat and veggie packets.

This was an adventure - it was just so muggy that the wood didn't want to burn at all. It smoked and smoked; we think maybe the wood was a little green as well. Finally we got it to burn to coals but not enough to cook with! So we scavenged the wood that was left in Papa's campfire ring and built another fire behind our coals. We did finally get everything to cook, but it was well after 9 p.m. before we got to eat. It was delicious, though!!

6/19/09 - Digging for Diamonds

June 19th - we got up early this morning and got ready to fulfill our get-rich-quick scheme of filling our pockets with diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, AR. We brought an assortment of tools - shovels, buckets, hammers, chisels, etc. and I bought some "old clothes" at WalMart the day before for the kids so that they wouldn't ruin anything we had packed to wear the rest of the trip. I bought them each a pair of $3 knit shorts and I bought a package of 6 boys' Hanes t-shirts that I could just throw away if they were ruined. I'm probably the only person in the world who doesn't already own "old clothes" for her kids to ruin.

Anyway, we got busy digging! This place is really just a gigantic field of dirt that is periodically plowed. From the email newsletters I get from them occasionally, it seems that about 10 people report findings of diamonds per month. But who knows how many finds go unreported, really, so we felt confident that we had at least a chance of finding a diamond with so many of us digging.



We weren't digging and sifting for long before Clara found something clear and sparkly - she was confident that she'd found a diamond and the rest of us thought it was probably a bit of quartz. It was pretty small but she was happy as could be - and pretty much done digging.

Hannah enjoyed working with the hoe that Papa had brought. It was like being part of a Three Stooges episode; the way she was swinging the handle around made me wonder when someone was going to get hit in the back of the head by it. She also liked that the soil had a very high clay content and did a lot more playing than digging, really. Another thing she really enjoyed was gathering up the biggest stones that she could find - pretty brown ones. I'm sure they had a name but I can't remember what they were called. We gave her a sandwich bag and told her she could keep whatever fit inside it; she eventually started saving smaller rocks so that she could keep more.

Becky did a bit of digging here and there and seemed to have a good time jumping from plow row to plow row and helping whomever appeared to need her expertise at the moment.

Matthew spent most of his time wandering up and down the plowed row, sitting on my leg, and tripping over his own feet.

After a while of digging and screening, we decided to take a bucket of dirt up to the sluicing station and try our hand at panning.


That's my dad standing next to me.

I'll tell you what - there are some people who take rock hounding very seriously. You should see some of their equipment!! One old man had a handmade harness-thing that fit around the back of his neck so that he could carry a 5-gallon bucket of dirt on each end of a broomstick across his shoulders - pack mule style. He wasn't very talkative, even though he was standing right next to us, but we did hear him tell a little boy from another family that he hadn't found any diamonds that day but that he had found plenty of them "recently." I believe him, too - he was a serious prospector.

Another man, on the other side of us, did eventually open up and talk to us quite a bit and even added a few rocks to Hannah's growing collection as they were ones that he was discarding. He had made a set of screens, about 5 or 6 of them in all different mesh and rim sizes, out of old bicycle rims. They worked really well and I could see an advantage to using a round screen compared to the square ones that we had. He did show us once how to wash and swirl, wash and swirl, and we did try! But we weren't very good at it and he laughed with us about it ... or maybe at us ... or maybe both.


Here you can see bicycle-rim man on the left and pack-mule-bucket man on the right. In between them, Clara and I are sifting through the fine bits of gravel that were left in our smallest-meshed screen. My dad, Papa, is behind us washing more gravel.


I'm glad my mom and dad thought to bring their point and shoot camera! I wanted to take pictures but didn't want to get my camera muddy; I probably would have accidentally dunked it in the sluice tank. Thanks, Mom, for taking these pictures for me!

After a while of this, and the fact that Farm Grandma had somehow gotten stuck with the chore of taking care of Becky and Matthew and occasionally the other girls as their interest waxed and waned in sluicing, we put our most promising and prettiest rocks in a little glass vial to be identified. It was really hot, we were ready for lunch, and we had promised to take the kids swimming.

It turned out that the sparkly rock that Clara had found was a chip of glass. We did find some bits of calcite, a piece of quartz and some jasper. And Hannah came out with a bag full of rocks that she thought were pretty; she was very excited just to have a collection of something. Clara came out with a bag of washed gravel from the sluicing station, but we gave it to Papa to take home and look through once it dried out. And it was promptly forgotten.

This post is long enough - I will add the swimming pictures in the next one.

6/18/09 - On Our Way to Murfreesboro, AR

June 18th - we left Grandma and Papa's house and headed for Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, AR. They followed along in their truck which was really exciting to the kids, who kept checking to make sure they were still back there.

It took us about 8 hours, including potty stops and a lunch break in the WalMart parking lot, to get to the campground. Our site wasn't too bad as far as campgrounds go. It was only $17 per night and it had water and electricity - so not the Waldorf or anything but the ground was pretty soft (sandy) and it didn't rain. The kids and I set up our tent in record time and later had our first official "campfire" meal with my parents - hot dogs and potato salad. We also had toasted marshmallows - yummy!

The kids and I were so tired that we had no trouble sleeping even though it was very hot and humid - not just in our tent but all around. It did cool off some in the night but it was muggy through and through. We had cereal for breakfast and got ready to go digging for diamonds!

6/17/09 - Time at Grandma and Papa's Farm

We spent the day with my parents today just hanging out and catching up. It was really hot so we tried to go swimming but the pool was closed for a private party. Papa was really nice to go and buy the kids a little inflateable pool for them to play in.

We did go up the path to the house that they are building and climbed the ladders to look around.











It's going to have quite a view!

And So It Begins!

We left home at about 10:00 a.m. and after only one trip back home to retrieve forgotten items, we managed to get on the road. Here we are in the van:






Along the way, we saw a lot of this kind of scenery:


We stopped halfway to see this monument - can you guess where we were?


Maybe this will help:


Right! The St. Louis Arch!




Here are the kids in front of the arch:


A very nice man with a much nicer camera than mine offered to take our picture together. Considering the Canon 5D with the ultra fancy lens he had hanging around his neck, I had no fear that he'd run off with mine. Plus, he was an old man and I think I could have taken him down if necessary (ha ha!)