Day 3: Monday, March 21, 2016
There were fortunes to be made today.
Unfortunately, those fortunes were not ours.
We spent the morning at Crater of Diamonds
State Park in Arkansas.
This was a
bucket list location for me.
I’ve wanted
to go for so many years.
It’s the
world’s only “finders keepers” diamond mine.
The plan was to find a diamond so big it would finance our trip and then
some.
Alas, it was not to be. Some
people find huge diamonds there.
Of
course, other people are there for months and never find anything.
We were only there for 2 and a half hours,
and all we found was some pretty quartz.
Oh well.
We still had a
blast!
There were two ways to look for
diamonds.
Surface finds, which seem to
be more common, are when you just walk along looking for that special
sparkle.
But other people, like my kids,
like to dig.
You can dig up a big bucket
and then use special screens to sift it in water to separate the good stuff
from the junk.
That was a lot of fun, if
a bit wet, and the highlight of the stop.
Well, that and playing in mud.
What boy doesn’t like a park where all he does is play in the mud?
After finally collecting all our boots from the mud pits and
slogging out of there, we stopped to grab a cache in the park, and then hopped
in the car for a long trek through Oklahoma.
The back woods of Arkansas reminded me so much of upstate NY, especially the area north of Syracuse.
It was a little eerie. We were so far south and yet felt so at home.
Oklahoma, however, was a whole lot of
nothing, not even cell service.
You
could see for miles, and there wasn’t a tower to be found. We finally reached
civilization around dinner time, right around Woody Guthrie’s hometown of
Okemah, OK. The town wasn't what I expected, but probably exactly what I should have expected to have produced a man like Woody Guthrie. It had a nice little park that featured a little statue of
Woody, though.
We snapped a few pictures,
grabbed a quick cache and some fast food dinner, and then sped along the highway
to our hotel in Amarillo, TX, still another 5 hours away. It was a long night,
but worth it to start our day in Amarillo!
After finally collecting all our boots from the mud pits and
slogging out of there, we stopped to grab a cache in the park, and then hopped
in the car for a long trek through Oklahoma.
The back woods of Arkansas reminded me so much of upstate NY, especially the area north of Syracuse. It was a little eerie. We were so far south and yet felt so at home. Oklahoma, however, was a whole lot of
nothing, not even cell service. You
could see for miles, and there wasn’t a tower to be found. We finally reached
civilization around dinner time, right around Woody Guthrie’s hometown of
Okemah, OK. The town wasn't what I expected, but probably exactly what I should have expected to have produced a man like Woody Guthrie. It had a nice little park that featured a little statue of
Woody, though. We snapped a few pictures,
grabbed a quick cache and some fast food dinner, and then sped along the highway
to our hotel in Amarillo, TX, still another 5 hours away. It was a long night,
but worth it to start our day in Amarillo! 
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