Discovering a Gold Mine!

They believe they've discovered an abandoned gold mine!  They're afraid to go in because of the possibility of rattlesnakes! and probably spiders or gila monsters!

So what do these intrepid explorers do?  Send in a point man, er, girl.  Who's missing from this picture?  Well, as this was taken on my daughter-in-law's smart phone, I'm guessin' they sent in the big girl!

Where am I?  Babysitting a sleeping baby in the car, of course.  Isn't that what Granma's are for? 

Must have been cleared out by the point lady, huh?

But the honest-to-goodness gold mine is right around the corner.

 

See all those lines of quartz in the side of the mountain.  THAT'S your first clue that there's gold around.  The guy that first stumbled onto this must have been ecstatic!

But this one definitely belongs to someone - and the iron door blocking the entrance means business.  But it is a real live gold mine!  (Look at all of that quartz!)

Downtime In Arizona

We may be in the high desert here in Arizona, but it's still hot in July.  In the afternoon, the grandkids would play in the shade of the front porch,

and completely used up a brand new, monster box of sidewalk chalk.

 

 

Day after day they would go outside, erase earlier artwork with Granpa's brush from his grilling set (uh-oh.....) and let their vast and vivid imaginations run wild.  When they ran out of design ideas they decided to make chalk dust.  Needless to say, they usually came in covered head to toe in more chalk than they managed to leave outside!  I loved it!  That is exactly what kids are supposed to do with their summers!

But I think some of the best artwork was saved for the t-shirts.  They were using "The Hobbitt" devotional book each day, and I think that's what inspired this one.  The Bible verse on the back was Jeremiah 51:34.

The Local Swimming Hole

What good is summer without going swimming?  So I found our public pool and we moseyed on over.

It took them all of two seconds to hop in.  (Of course it took my daughter-in-law and I two days to round up the snorkels and masks and swimming diapers...)  They were having a marvelous time.

And then they noticed a couple of lifeguards scrutinizing the far corner of the shallow end.  Turns out some little child had done something unacceptable over there - and they cleared the entire pool of humanity for thirty minutes!






I must say, my grandkids were wonderful about the "warm up" time.

Eventually they got to hop back in.

Got to do a couple of stunts off the diving board,

(Yup, I missed the action on that...)  and the swim session ended.  But even then the smiles never left their faces!

"I Love Museums"

THE reason we decided to go to Kingman's History Museum is because ....

... nearly every time we asked the kids what they wanted to do, this lil' guy would wanna go to a museum!!  (I knew he was my grandchild!)

My daughter-in-law wanted to be certain no one got lost in our travels, so she bought neon-colored t-shirts for everyone and had the kids decorate one side and make a statement on the other.  I'll be showing them to you throughout the posts.   I have some very talented artists coming up!

The museum's presentation of the story of the native Hualapai and the Paiute, etc., really caught their attention.

"he called the waliapai, the next paiute, hopi, etc.  these he made into a bundle and laid them in the east.  when they came alive it was day and they all came back to live around wikame."

 "but quarrels broke out which became more bitter as the days went by so"

"tudjupa decided to separate them into tribes as he had planned in the beginning"

"he gave the mohave rules and instructions how to live and left them at wikame"

 

(Here is where it gets really interesting!)

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"the ground will be covered with thorns so to protect your feet make sandals, thongs, of yucca and cover them with pinon gum"

"all this is for you. now do as I have told you so I may see that you have learned everything right"

"and we did so, free and happy to follow the natural course of our lives,

hunting, gathering, and living with the land"

"but from the east white men came with lust for land and gold

driving us from our springs and homes and hunting us like deer"

 

"and with the whites came a new sickness and a new death forcing upon us a way of life outside of our experience."

"we fought to keep ourselves intact"

"we were isolated from our source of life - our land - left homeless and herded without a country and the old way was ripped from our souls"

"fragmented and broken as we were, this strange way of life failed to fill the hole from which our own tradition had been torn - we lost the roots of our being which had held us to the earth, our past, and had nourished us with the image of what we were"

 

But my natives were getting restless,

 and the next thing I knew there were "danger" signals in the gold mine.

They were ready to explode!

and my whole crew ended up in the calaboose!