Hi all,
Well we have survived our big adventure.For those who haven't heard we took a short vacation up into Arkansas to visit the Crater of Diamonds State Park, where you just pick up diamonds laying on the ground, (yea right, but more on that later). Due to the price of the local motels and lack of restaurants we decided to try this trip by RV. We got a great price on a rental unit from a local dealer.
When I picked it up I was amazed at how much room it had inside, little did I know that over the course of the very rainy weekend it would shrink! I was also amazed at how it drove. It was kind of like driving the Queen Mary over narrow roads full of idiot drivers.
We got up to the park late Friday night. Of course by that time the kids had all slept in their car seats during the trip up. Stopping and setting the RV up of course woke them up. Having been fully rested they decided it was time for the big three, Fussing, Fighting, and Feuding! After repeated threats of serious beatings they all finally settled in and went to sleep. Ah, how nice to be that young and to be able to sleep...
It rained that night, sometimes lightly, and sometimes hard. Being in an RV in a rainstorm is I imagine kind of like being inside a snare drum with an energetic drummer beating on it. Friday night was just a taste of the things to come..
Saturday morning finally came, cold, wet, raining, and dreary but we were ready to go find our fortune in diamonds.
After numerous diaper changing’s, trips to the bathroom, cups of weak coffee and a small war over cereal or oatmeal for breakfast we headed up to the diamond field. Little did we know what was in store for us. Our imaginations just utterly failed.
The diamond field is 37 acres of well plowed, spade turned, sifted, sorted, pureed clay dirt. Add lots of rain to this and you get an especially nice form of pure southern muck. Within 10' - 15' into the field your shoes are so caked it's hard to walk.
We were determined though and the kids were being true DeKnight's! Let's get muddy!
We found what we though would be a likely area loaded with diamonds and proceeded to start poking through the goo, after all, the ones just laying on the surface had probably already been picked up by the other several hundred people out here in the cold, muddy, rain.
Not finding anything in the goo we were poking through we decided to load up a bucket of goo and go screen it in the sluice buckets. This involved a trek to the far side of the 37 acres, (not far on a warm dry day, but a heck of a long way on a cold wet muddy day while carrying a 5 gallon bucket for of goo with 50 gallons of goo on your shoes).
The sluice bucket is a large metal trash dumpster sized container yet more goo, and a little bit of goo colored water that has been appropriately chilled to something approaching absolute zero, (where all molecular motion stops, also known as really freaking cold!) The object here was to transfer some of the contents of your bucket of goo to your sluice screens and use the goo colored water to rinse the goo away and pick your diamonds out of the gravel. Easy in theory, not so in practice.
Vicky and the kids lasted about 1/2 a bucket o' goo before common sense took hold and they retreated to the RV for lunch and clean dry clothes. Fortunately the park provides a high presure water hose for blasting the goo of you and your small children. This leaves you clean but now very wet.
Myself, showing an amazing lack of common sense decide that the diamonds are in the next scoop of goo and keep going. Of course by this time I can no longer feel my feet as they are standing in ankle deep water that is surprisingly cold, or was before I lost all feeling. My hands have went from, cold to numb, to somewhere south of Antarctica really quick. About the only body parts I had any feeling in were my back, (something about hunched over a sluice bucket for long hours at a time), and my right shoulder, (the torn rotator cuff).
I finally finished the first bucket and had some possible diamonds, (not that I had much of a clue as to what they looked like) in my possibles bag.
At this point the smart thing to do, (not that I do the smart thing that often) would have been to go back to the RV and get warmed up and eat something. Well, you guessed it, I did not go back to the RV but got another bucket of goo, repeated the above process and thought I'd found the find of a lifetime! The clarity was just like looking through glass, really nice sized! I figured with my luck though it was a chunk of beer bottle. You know, I'd really like to shoot the idiots who wander out there and drink, (in this case Miller High Life) and then break their bottles and scatter the bits about!
I finally decided I’d had enough and that with the diamonds I had in my possibles bag I could call it quits for the day.
I mucked my way down to the clean up station and at that point it dawned on me what a racket the park has. The cleanup station was a raised mesh grate with high pressure water hoses. You wash all of the accumulated mud off of you and everything falls through the mesh grate, including whatever diamonds may have been stuck to the bottom of your shoes!
Once clean, but now even colder I go to check in my tools and get my receipt back for the $30 damage deposit for a plastic bucket and army surplus shovel, (for $30 I could have bought several plastic buckets and surplus army shovels). Opps, I can’t get the damage deposit back because I don’t have the receipt, Vicky has it, and at this point she is about 3000 miles away in the RV. Did I mention how hungry, tired, in pain, and hypothermic I was at this point? Cell phone reception? Yea right, we are in the middle of rural Arkansas, in fact if you listen close you can hear banjo music from “Deliverance” playing somewhere nearby.
I figure if I have the park people evaluate my fabulous finds and tell me how many carats of stunning gem quality diamonds I have found I’d feel at least a little better. Needless to say after having them evaluate what I found, I didn’t feel better, but I was making revenge plans on the bubba who broke his beer bottle out there!
Vicky, at this point through some psychic wife/mother sense realizes she needs to bring me the receipt and shows up with the wet monkeys in tow. Off we go to the RV now so I can eat, get warmed up and investigate what drugs I brought with me to get rid of the pain that I’m going to be having once I defrost. The walk back to the RV, gee, who would have thought more rain and more mud.
Upon arrival I promptly strip out of my wet soggy, frozen clothes, at this point Vicky comments about my Celtic background. Seems I am all blue and naked, I explain that no, I didn’t paint myself blue and really had no plans to run around and chop people up with a sword, that the blue was from the hypothermia. I Fired up the heater in the RV, set the temperature setting to something beyond, “interior of the sun” and sat down to a can of soup. Three hours later the monkeys were well broiled and I was thawed out.
Spent the evening playing many enjoyable games with the kids like, “Get out of the cab and leave the switches alone”, “Get off the top bunk before you fall”, “See I told you, you would fall and get hurt”, “Quit hitting your sister”, and the all time favorite, “Quit hitting your brother”. Looking around at the RV it begin to dawn on me that since it was getting wet it seemed to be shrinking. Vicky assured me it was just my imagination but I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the Darvocet and a beer affecting me.
Saturday night God decided we really hadn’t experience lots of rain since the time of Noah so he opened the tap a bit more. Trying to sleep that night was something akin to being inside the same snare drum, now with a lot more people banging away at it.
The RV had a bit of a swaying motion to it in the wind, I really wasn’t sure it was the wind or we had enough rain that we were starting to float. I had to get up a couple of times throughout the night and check.
37 years later it was finally morning. We looked outside and realized how cold, wet, muddy, and miserable another day of diamond prospecting was going to be and in a rare bit of common sense decided not to go wading through the rain and raging flood waters to get to the muddy field looking for diamonds. We decide instead to go wade through the rain, raging flood waters, and mud to look for Geocaches! Of course we still had to go through the inevitable fussing, fighting and fueding, getting the monkeys dressed, finding their shoes, (how do they lose shoes in a RV that’s rapidly approaching something the size of a postage stamp?)
After an aborted try for breakfast at the park restaurant, (oops, only open Memorial day through Labor day) we headed out in search of a place to get some breakfast. Did I mention we were in rural Arkansas and it was Sunday morning? Thought maybe we might find something in Hope being that it is infamous as Bubba’s birthplace. No luck. Gave some thought to driving around trying to find where he was born and dumping the septic tank but thought better of it. We didn’t find anything till it was lunchtime and we were in Texarkana! I’d had my mind and stomach set on a big plate of biscuits and gravy since morning. Thank you IHOP!
The drive back was just another part of the adventure, heavy rain, followed by even heavier rain, followed by even more rain. Compound this with driving something akin to the Queen Mary and throw in lots of traffic. We got to see stunning examples of foul weather driving like people doing 95, people doing 25, to my personal favorite, pass me on the right, yank into my lane, and then apply the brakes quickly while trying to come to a full stop in the left lane of interstate to help somebody stuck in the median. Of course I just happened to be doing 60-70 when the bozo tried that. He about lost the back end of his pickup and we about lost the front end of the RV not to mention sending Vicky through the windshield as she was in the back taking Emelie to that bathroom for the 763 time.
We got close to home and God decided it needed to rain some more. By this time the water in the creeks and streams were getting close to coming over some of the roads. After gassing up in Greenville, TX we hit our first closed road. Seems the road ahead was flooded out. Unfortunately, while the RV drove like the Queen Mary it wouldn’t float, not that we tried. We managed to grab a turn around and headed back into Greenville to try some alternate routes. After finding several flooded roads and dealing with a 4 year old who was becoming more and more scared of the high water we finally found a road that wasn’t flooded and headed for high ground.
By the time we got home, it was time for yet even more rain! The offloading of the RV of monkeys, gear and muddy shoes was accomplished in an amazingly short time. I think it had something to do with that fact that what had started as a 25’ RV had now shrunk to something the size of a postage stamp!
Lessons learned:
RV’s shrink in close proximity to fussing, feuding, fighting children.
Finding diamonds isn’t as easy as you think.RV’s are a good way to travel if your not in the middle of a biblical flood.
