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My wife and I enjoy exposing our kids to new and different experiences. Some experiences are simply for the fun of it, while others are focused on learning. Sometimes you get lucky and find one that accomplishes both. This year while on our family vacation, we were lucky enough to have a number of experiences that covered both. Tonight, I'm going to tell you about one of those experiences. While checking into our vacation cabin my daughter came across a flyer for Gem Mountain in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. She and my son got really excited at the thought of being able to mine a huge diamond and strike it rich.

We checked out the web site for Gem Mountain. The first attraction we came across was "flume mining" where you buy a bucket full of rock and earth. You're given a screen and bucket and take it to the flume to filter out the waste material. A flume is essentially a long trough with water flowing down it. You pour some of contents of your bucket into the screen and swish it around in the flume to find the good stuff, pick it out, and toss what you don't want into a pit. Now this sounded like fun, but the more I read, the better it got. They had tours from 10am-2pm to the actual mines where you could fill up your own bucket with nothing but good stuff. All you had to do is show up. They supply the transportation, the equipment and a guide. Now that got my imagination going with images of Indiana Jones and mining carts. Naturally, I picked up the phone and quickly made a reservation.

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A few days later, we headed over to Gem Mountain to go on our magical get rich tour. We picked up a few bottles of water, because after all, how hot can it possibly get when your mining underground. We didn't know it yet, but we were in for a bit of a surprise on that note. We met up with the other folks that were going on the tour, and our guide "Charlie". Excitement was in the air as we were guided to our chariot. In this case it was an aging van with dirt floors. Obviously and older model, since the new model has wooden floors. Once we buckled the seatbelts that would clasp, we were on our way. The lady in front of us was a long time truck driver. Our guide had a background in trucking, so they quickly hit it off exchanging stories. Stories of truck brakes failing and driving over cliffs. The perfect kind of story when your driving up a narrow gravel road with a steep cliff on one side. After a short while, we made it to the entrance of the mine and were issued our tools which consisted of a hammer and a 2 gallon bucket. Now we were set to start mining. This is also when we found out that today's tour was to an open mine. This meant that we would not have to coolness that I was planning for. in fact, it was in the direct sunlight with no shade. No worries, we had a few bottles of water and it was still early.

So, now we descended down the path into the mine. It looked like there was glitter everywhere. Charlie told us that this was the mica.
[Hand Out Mica to pass around] Here is some of the mica we took out of the mine.
You could see a huge vein of it in the earth straight ahead. As we walked down to the floor of the mine, he started pointing out what we should be looking for. He showed us
[Hand out Tourmaline, Garnet, and Aquamarine]
Tourmaline, Garnet, Aquamarine, and some other kinds of minerals and told us to have at it and if we had any questions about what we had found to let him know and he would tell us what we had discovered. We got lucky, as it had rained the day before it had washed a lot of the dirt away and exposed a lot of gems that we could easily grab. We had a lot of fun digging in the dirt looking for buried treasure. By noon, our water was gone, and the kid's were done and taking a break in the tree shade outside the mine. We all found some great stuff and decided to finish early so we could get back to the flume to clean up our treasures and see how rich we now were. We found quite a few semi-precious stones, and had a lot of fun with the whole the process. We packed our 50 lbs of treasure into the car and headed back to our cabin.

I could not just leave well enough alone and be happy with taking a bunch of rough stones back home since we decided against having them appraised or cut. I looked online and found a rock tumbler that we could use to polish our treasure and placed the order. The tumbler I selected does two small batches at one time. We put some Aquamarine and Tourmaline in and started the polishing process.
Five weeks after starting the tumbling process, our rough stones came out nice and smooth like river rock. [Hand out smooth stones to pass around]
This is just my wasy of taking our experience to the next level.

Conclusion

Exposing your children and yourselves to new and exciting things can be a great learning experience for the whole family. Everyone gets something different out of it. My daughter got treasures. My son got to dig in the dirt. My wife got lots of pretty gems, and I got to play and take it to the next level with the tumbler. I encourage you all to try something new and different. Something that is as far away from what you do for a living as possible. Experiences like these draw us closer, spark the imagination and allow us to decompress from out daily lives.

Thank you all, I'll now turn the lectern back over to our Toastmaster.

Speech given 9/3/11 at the Second Life Toastmasters club meeting and on 10/3/11 at Bluegrass Toastmasters club meeting.