Tired of heading to theme parks? The Travel Channel showed a program last night entitled “America’s Best Places to Find Cash & Treasures” and profiled several places where you and your family could spend a day hunting for fossils and semi-precious and precious stones.
Most of these places are rural and a bit out-of-the way but might make for a fun pit stop on a long cross-country road trip. I couldn’t find a link to the program and only caught part of it, so here are the sites they featured that I remember:
- U-Dig Fossils, Delta, Utah: go hunting for fossils in a large quarry
- Gem mining in Franklin, NC: buy a bucket of rocks on the cheap and pan away for gems
- Royal Peacock Mine, Denio, NV: Bring a pickaxe, screwdriver, and a bucket of water to hunt for black opals, the rarest of them all.
- Gems of Pala (at the Stewart Mine), Pala, CA: Just north of San Diego, go hunting for pink tourmaline.
There were a few other places that I didn’t catch for hunting gold and other goodies. The benefits of going to these places is that you’re doing something together as a family, you’re mostly outdoors enjoying the weather, and they’re definitely educational, since you’ll learn about how gemstones are created and what fossils creatures existed and when.
Besides, who doesn’t love a treasure hunt?
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Mighty Bargain Hunter » Carnival of Personal Finance #54
[…] Take the family treasure-hunting for a vacation! Find anything, Experiments in Finance? […]
reynold
If you are planning a vacation, try here in the Palawan, Philippines while guiding you into an adventure plus treasure hunting.