I've mentioned it before, but I just love factory tours, and any other tour of "how it's made", pretty much regardless of what it is -- chocolate, sure, but breweries, distillaries, and baseball bats have all been great fun. Today we ventured into what the slogan said was "deep, dark, dirty...awesome": The Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo. We didn't just do the panning for gold part, or the simple version of the tour -- ours required coveralls, hard hats, head lamps, and rubber boots, and it lived up to it's tag line for the three of us. We learned all about finding the gold in the quartz, and how to guess which direction to look when you dig, and we ate a traditional miners' lunch of pasties (half vegetable, half apple pie). We climbed up and down ladders and scrambled along the gravel paths. The highlight was putting on our ear muffs and turning on the drill! If we thought that fire hose a couple weeks ago had a kick to it, that was nothing compared to the drill pounding into the bedrock! We did not, however, discover any gold, despite the promise of "finders keepers"...some flakes of pyrite are all we got to bring home....turns out the "fool's gold" is prettier anyway!
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