He split the rocks in the desert and gave them water as abundant as the seas.
On the last day of the trip, we took a detour east to Arkansas...where we stopped by the Crater of Diamonds State Park. Now when I was a little girl, my parents took me up there to find a diamond. I remember it being a huge open mud field, with no shade, no where to sit, and being pretty miserable all day long in the July heat. Well, it was exactly the same some 30-odd years later. Of course the gift shop and equipment rental facility was much improved (not to mention that they added a water park to the grounds but it costs extra, of course), but the open mud field was a scorching 115 F and the shade was only there if you wanted to hike a half mile to it. Needless to say, I hadn't changed my feelings about it much. BUT...it is one of those places that most parents just seem obligated to take their children to visit at least once, just so they can say they did it and the kids can say they dug for a real diamond in a real diamond mine.
After my half a mile hike to a shady spot, I sat there and looked out in the open field...lots of little clusters of families with children, much like my own, and in every cluster, there was a screaming kid saying something like, "It's hot moooommmmmyyy!!! I wanna go home!!!! Can we go to the car NOW?????" I was laughing on the inside, happy that it wasn't just me!
My boys, on the other hand, found it to be not exactly fun, but a quest...a quest to find a diamond. André had it in his mind that he wasn't leaving without one, so he set out to dig a pit that we could bury someone in. J.P. helped, of course. Clay gave up and sat with me in the shade. Jeramey went to the gift shop to cool off. After about 3 hours of searching and digging, we finally had lunch and called it a day.
We left with some really neat rocks, some family memories, and some vacation snapshots. No diamonds. At least that's one more vacation place I can check off the list of places I need to take the kids to see.
1 comment:
This was on my places to visit. Maybe I'll skip over that one.
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