Days 17 & 18 (Friday/Saturday)

Off to Sapphire !
But before leaving Emerald we went to the local park and viewed their oversized Van Gogh painting of Sunflowers and a Mosaic Walk which outlined the history of the area.
The area used to grow sunflowers until the crops were effected by a disease and they must now wait a specified no.of years before growing again. The painting stood 25m high on an easel.

Sapphire is part of the central west gemfields and we were off to do some fossicking the easy way. Jessica, determined to find some sapphires and thereby a new piece of jewellery, was excited. The rock hound came out in her again!!

We arrived mid-morning and nothing, not even the approaching heat of the day was going to stop George and Jessica from starting straight away. But remember I mentioned an "easy way" - yes,there is! There are quite a few Fossicking Parks set up where you buy a bucket of 'wash'( instead of having to get a license and dig it yourself) and just wash, sort and pick out the sapphires or zircons. If your lucky you may get something big enough to have facetted for jewellery.

So we did one bucket at a place called Armfest, where I constantly acted like a typical mum and bugged them to ' slip, slop and slap', annoyingly. And another in the afternoon at Blue Hollow where they also facet and set the stones in jewellery. We found quite a few stones but only 2 worthwhile setting into small rings. The waiting list for this was up to January and is cash on delivery. This suited us on our limited travel budget so we chose our ring settings and left the stones to be faceted. Some of the rest we could send to Thailand later to have faceted, but they are very small.
Also did a tour through an underground sapphire mine.

We bush camped on a fossicking field called ' Big Bessie' and though dry we enjoyed ourselves. Discovered George had left our shower tent at home and packed a 2nd tent instead( don't really need either unless someone comes to visit)- but our Guide Leader would be proud. Us girls put our heads together and used our guiding skills to rig up a tarp between bus and trailer for this. Jessica also enjoyed visits from rainbow lorikeets each morning and night. 2 the first night, 3 in the morning, 6 the 2nd night and about 30 + the last morning. Will post photos so watch this spot!!