Day 20 - Gems, geocaching, and a giant rocking chair

Who would have thought Austinburg, OH held such treasures?  My boys love rocks.  They pick them up all the time and can tell me pretty much where each one is from.  Each rock holds memories for my kids.  (On a side note, if you think that's neat, read Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass)  So when I saw the brochure for Noema Gems, I knew I wanted to check it out.  http://www.noemagems.com/


Noema Gems is just this little building in a teeny town in Ohio just below I90, though the back roads are way more scenic.  The place is a store and mini-museum; you can buy gems of all kinds and look at some interesting displays.  But the attraction is the mining for minerals and gems.  So you pay $4 and get a bucket of stones to sift through.  They give you this little display to help identify what you find, and of course, you can keep anything you want.  The boys had a blast - they found some quartz, fool's gold, flint, amber, and many other things.  Ben even found two shark teeth!  Eventually, though, they started to complain cause it was too hot.  Really?  This kind of weather is what we've been waiting for.  And there's no whining on adventure day, so a little cold water and we were off.

The rock store.

Ben found a shark tooth.

I had printed a few sets of coordinates for geocaches at what sounded like fun locations, so our next stop was  the world's largest rocking chair.  Well, there are probably bigger ones, but we've never seen 'em.

I love it!

Hehehe...isn't it great?  I am all for cheesy attractions.  Look how little the boys are on the sides!  It amazes me sometimes how popular geocaching is.  While we were sorting through the treasures of the geocache, another family stopped to find it.  And we weren't the first ones to find it today.

Our next stop was less than a mile away.  The name of the geocache was "Cool Treat on a Hot Day."  Perfect.  Even more perfect was that Ben had nabbed a coupon out of the rocking chair geocache for that very ice cream store.  See, the universe is on my side lately.  The cool thing about this particular geocache was its container.  Many geocaches are ammo containers.  This one was too, only it was probably an ammo container for GI Joe.  Teeny tiny.  And our new friends from the rocking chair - that was their next stop, too.

Just what we needed on a 90 degree day.

Teeny tiny.  Clever.

On the way home, we saw a sign for a covered bridge, so of course, we couldn't pass it up.  The Doyle Road bridge is beautiful, and predictably, Jordan found a geocache.  Apparently there is one at every bridge.  We didn't even have the coordinates for this one; he just found it.  Yep...we're that good.  hehe.  And also predictably, the kids had to check out the creek.

So Austinburg is about 50 minutes from our house in Conneaut Lake, so our adventure took about four hours total.  I didn't disclose exactly where we were going after the rock shop, and the boys at first wanted to come straight home.  When are they going to learn to trust me? :-)

Doyle Road covered bridge.

Ben's treasures

Jordan's treasures.