Quote of The Week:

"Retirement life is a game. Happy people are the players. Unhappy people are the spectators. Which would you like to be?
from Ernie Zelinski's How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free"

— Ernie J. Zelinski

We got out of Little Rock without any problems (knock on wood!). We’re headed toward Crater of Diamonds State Park, where we’ll spend the night in the state park campground AND become wealthy beyond belief when we find diamonds in the only open field diamond in the nation.

As we boogied down the boulevard (drove on the interstate), we noticed some signs for a restaurant that we had seen profiled on the FoodNetwork called Lambert’s. What they are famous for is their down home country cooking, and the fact that some of the servers walk around throwing dinner rolls to the patrons all the way across the dining room. So we decided that it would be a fun place to stop for lunch.

The place is awesome! You could walk around all day long looking at all of the nick knacks and “stuff” just sitting around and never see it all. The food was fabulous, and enough on one plate for two complete meals. And yes, they go around throwing rollas all over the place. I tried to get a picture of a roll being thrown, but my timing was terrible. But looking at the pictures will give you an idea of what it’s like.

We arrived at Crater of Diamonds State Park in the early afternoon, so we checked in and found a spot in the campground. After getting the coach properly situated, we headed off to do some diamond searching. I’ve included some pictures of our activites. It cost us about $20.00 for our admission and the rental of some hand tools such as shovels, a screed to sift dirt, and a bucket to haul all of your loot (yeah, right!). Actually, we were there on the 9th day of the year and already 13 diamonds had been found. They average something like 350 diamonds a year that are found. We went out to “sluice” area, where, Jenny assured me, it was easier to sift the dirt than by dry sifting. You’ll see by the pictures that you shovel a bunch of dirt into the bucket, then you put a small quantity of dirt onto the screed. You swish that around in the water until just big stones are left. Then you take off the top of the screed, and repeat the swishing motion (swishing IS the official term I’m told) with the second screed, which has a smaller screen in it. After swishing for a bit, you dump the mud/residue upside down onto a table. The mud/residue will not stick to a diamond, so you should see the diamond laying on the top of the mud/residue. Please make note that I used the term should, rather than would, because if I had used would, that would imply that there would be a diamnod there. There were no diamonds. I do believe that there SHOULD have been some diamonds, but they weren’t there the day we were. It was fun though.

The only notable incident that occurreed while we were there was the fact that the water pressure was so low in the campground, there wasn’t enough pressure to add any water to our fresh water tank. Fortunately we had enough already on board, which is not usually the case. I usually keep it as low as I can while we’re traveling to cut down on the extra weight of the water.

Next stop, Tyler, Texas.

( Throwing Rolls & Diamond Hunting )