Deming Rocks

I will not mention any name(s) but we are not the only members of the class of 2007,( people who sold their house and went fulltime rving in 2007), that have rocks in their fifth wheel and I mean rocks plural. See if you hang around Deming, rocks and rock hounds are everywhere and you are bound to get hooked. Express even the slightest interest  and we will even give you some free rocks to get you started! We have rocks to spare!

We left Mesa and drove the long drive to Deming, checking into the Escapee Park and being warmly greeted by Wallace and Wanda. Wallace is a rock hound himself and has more rocks then you can count scattered all around the park!

So it wasn’t long before we were talking about rock hounding, places to go see, and even sharing and trading rocks! Of course we ended up trading some of our Wyoming lepidolite for some Big Diggins agate, some Baker Ranch rough, and some assorted slices of other local rocks I know you may think that we have too many already but Wallace knows you can never have enough rocks!

Saturday morning arrived and we drove to Silver City. Stopping  at a flea market, and guess what, we found several sellers with rocks in their booths. We soon left with our first pieces of turquoise, some green turquoise and azurite, and another rough rock of green turquoise.

I could hardly sleep thinking about working the turquoise and so I set up our grinder and made my first turquoise cabochon. I ground some other rocks into cabochons and soon our friend  Marty was over and watching me. He could see I was having too much fun and he left with a sack full of slabs.

Another day and another rock shop and there was Marty buying rocks. He wasn’t the only one and Renita and I added to our collection with some beautiful cathedral agate. The shop owner had to show us some beautiful gold moss agate and it was like a junkie as I grabbed the slab and offered him my billfold,(well almost).

The next day we decided we had enough rock and it was time to leave Deming. That night our toilet broke and the repair kit parts I had already bought didn’t work, go figure. Getting online we drove to the Camping World in El Paso and purchased a whole new unit. It went in so easy that we had our repairs done that evening and I only had to make one run to the local hardware store!

Our plan to leave was again stymied as a massive cold front was blasting through and we decided to stay here for a couple more days until the wind died down. It was a good choice as we saw a motor home roll in with a destroyed awning. Hearing about a new rock shop north of town we headed there just to look at what they had.

The store owners were so kind and knowledgably that we just had to buy some more rock, We now own some excellent lapis and even some rare Tiffany stone, which was originally used in Tiffany stained glass lamps!  Can you blame us?

After eating lunch at the fifth wheel we headed to the Deming Museum to look at the rock collections. Now we had seen the collections two years ago but we know so much more and so we spent some quality time holding hands and peering into rock cases. Lucky for us the museum sells rocks as a money raiser and being giving souls Renita picked out some slabs of New Mexico Crazy agate.

We are leaving Deming tomorrow and heading east,  either  that or we will need to rent a storage unit for all the rocks we have added to our traveling house. We don’t care if others make fun of us and tell us about the movie, The Long Long Trailer. At least we slice the rocks so they don’t roll out of our oven!

Clear skies.