Road Rage and Gold Fever

First for the road rage.

When we left Georgia and heading for South Carolina, we were having a pretty good day.  The traffic wasn't too bad.  We try to leave late enough to miss the morning traffic.  After about 1 hour Ed had to go to the bathroom.  We had passed a rest stop, he should have stopped there, but it was too late and he didn't think he could wait until the next one.  There was a rather wide paved shoulder to the road, and since we have our bathroom on board, he decides to pull over on the shoulder.  When he is ready to get back on the road, I was a little worried about oncoming traffic.  He thinks he has plenty of time, there was a semi and a car coming but he thought it was far enough back.  Well, he pulls out and within a short time the car and the truck are passing us.  For the most part, truckers don't like Rv's.  I think they think we go to slow, and now that gas has gone up so much, Ed is really driving slow.  Well anyways, the trucker honks his horn, and Ed honks back.  I am sure  that was a mistake.  The next thing we know, the truck is coming over in our lane.  If  Ed hadn't swerved over, I think we might have collided.  So the truck passes us and speeds up.  By then, Ed decides to get his license # and call the police.  I didn't think it would have done any good but I thought if it was a company truck, we could report him.  I think the driver realized we were trying to catch him because he was moving on down the road.  Ed got up to about 78 mph and decided he couldn't catch him.  He didn't want to have an accident and he also didn't want to waste his gas.  I was all for not having an accident.  I have to say I was scared.  I am glad Ed decided not to participate in further.

We spent the night in South Carolina and we are now at Forest Lake Thousand Trails.  We are in Gold Country.  Well, close to it anyways.  There are two mines about 48 miles south of us.  We were going to check out the mines on Saturday, but that is when all the tornados went through.  We made it through the storms without any damage.  But because of the storms, we decided to wait until Sunday.  We got to one of the mines called Cotton Patch about 2 o'clock.  They close at 5 so we went with 5 buckets of dirt to pan.  Here is the mine and us panning.

                                                                         This is the office.

                              This is where they keep the bucket of dirt.  We went thru 5 of them in 3 hours.

                                                                  Ed doing his thing.

                      I was looking very intently.  Also the water was cold, but eventually I did take off the gloves.

The panning goes pretty slow, you feel like you are going to lose some gold when you wash out the dirt.  They tell you the gold settles to the bottom of the pan.  Ed found the first piece.  He found the second  piece and the third.  I found a small sliver, very small.  I don't think it made it into the bottle because we don't even have it now.  I don't know if Ed's technique was better than mine or I just didn't have any to find.  The piece's are rather small (really small) but they are a start.  We are planning on doing this out west, so we have to start some place.  My sister says "why are you doing this, for fun or for the money."  I have to admit, I'm not sure.  I think I will be excited if I ever find anything.  Hey, we spent hours looking for shark teeth and they aren't worth anything.

So after we left the Cotton Patch we went 1/2 mile down the road to another mine called the Mountain Creek Gold Mine.  Sort of run by "a good old boy".  Ed liked him.  So we are going there tomorrow.  They have this big drum and the guy fills it up with a back hoe.  Then you break it down and run it through a sluice (looks like a conveyor belt.)  It catches the fine sand and any gold.  Than you have to pan that dirt and look for the gold.  It all comes down to the panning.  They are open 8 - 5.  We are going to try and make it all day.  I will tell you how we do.  The guy told us he has a couple from Pennsylvania  that come down twice a year and do this.  They are in their 80's.  So  if they can do it , we should be able to also.

 This is the second mine and this is what we will be doing tomorrow.  The drum gets filled with dirt and you run water in there and break it down.

                                             This is the office of the 2nd mine, a little more rustic

                                           The owner said he found this mining pan under 6 feet of dirt.

                                     You can't see it but there is some small grains of gold in that pan.

So actually I can't say I have gold fever yet.  Wait till I find some and I will let you know. I think it has to be bigger than what Ed found.  Tomorrow will tell.

One last thing.  I added something to the blog.  There is a place to put in your e-mail address and when I post a new blog it will let you know.  This was requested by a friend and just recently she sent me a link telling me how to do it.  So hope it works and thanks Donna. 

HAPPY TRAILS   Love Ed and Lyn