Diggin's Day!

 

We went to Diggin's Day in Columbia, 2017, and I thought it was the most fun I ever had. We "traveled through time" until the 1849's, and then we were presented with a name tag, and 3 eagles, (gold coins). We had a group leader, me and my mom and brother and sister, my best friend's family, and our landlord and her kids. First of all, we were led with our group leader to various places, including a blacksmith, bakery, school house, and gold mine. After the bell rang for the end of the school house tour, we were allowed to stroll around the "tent town". There was about five different people sitting/standing in front of their stores, shouting to any random person walking by, " STEP RIGHT OVER HERE FOLKS, COME AND GET YOUR ICE COLD SARSAPARILLA!" Since we were in the 1849's; there was more of an accent around, so it sounded more like this: "STEP RIGHT OVER HERE FOLKS, COME A GET YO IZE COL' SAZPARILA!" I did not get a sarsaparilla, but I did get three lemon drops for 1 gold coin, and a tin of lemonade for 2 gold coins. There was a refill for lemonade, so I was very hydrated. Our landlord's son gave me a coin from the "coin fairy". I bought some rather salty  peanuts for my best friend and I. We ate  some outside the general store and took the rest over to the mining camp. It was a grimy, grubby, muddy, watery place, and the whole spot was clothed in the same burnt sienna color everywhere you looked. Her and I set to work laboring over a conveyer belt contraption attached to a long tom, another word from the miner slang dictionary. Then we started panning for gold, and a mother and her four year old daughter walked up and the mother asked me if I willing to teach her daughter to pan for gold. I answered yes, and started right away. The little girl was more cooperative than I thought. She soon tired of panning, and drifted to the rocker box. The rocker box was soon swarming with little kids that wanted to help, but soon they found something else interesting and floated off. I asked the little girl if she wanted to do a "gold check", but the answer always was," Not yet." So we kept on pouring and shaking forever until the little girl found another piece of mica, ( she had already found three! ) and went to show her mom, and I leapt over to the other side of the rocker box and started digging for a piece of gold. I dug and dug through the wet grubby mess and found a piece of blue plastic. I dug again and I saw a little shiny nugget shape thing and I picked it up and it was GOLD! Wowsers Bedowsers ( that is what I always say when I am excited.)! I showed it to about everyone there and now probably everyone in Columbia knows about the gold I found! It was a nugget, as shown up in the top left,( actual size ).  After all the fun had declined to a few old actors from the time before and some dawdlers from our school and others, we left and drove abut five minutes from the camp to my best friend's house, which was a blast indeed. We played for about an hour, nerf gun fights and being shown around the house, and then we had baked potatoes for dinner and cake for dessert, ( it was my best friend's little sister's eighth birthday. ). And then we played some more and it was time to go home. It was a regally lovely day, and we all enjoyed ourselves hugely.