Rolleston to Anakie

We stopped at Emerald for a bit of a look around before driving out to Sapphire and Rubyvale were I had big plans to find enough Sapphires to pay for our trip or even a week would have been nice! We camped at a free camp in Sapphire which wasn't much and we even had a herd of cows walk thru our campsite towards the end of day!

We ended up doing a self drive tour which was a really good experience. We followed our tour guide out to a spot in the gem fields, were given buckets, a shovel and a pick and you can stay as long as you like digging and washing your own sapphires. We did end up finding about 8 small sapphires before Chloe had enough, so not enough to fund even a week. Lucy worked like a little trooper the whole time, Chloe had enough after about an hour but luckily we had packed some animals which kept her busy for a few more hours.

Brad and Lucy hard at work!

Sorting the sand out

Washing the stones

Picking out the sapphires!

On the way home from our fossicking expedition we called into a little town called Anakie to have a look at the caravan park there and quickly decided to pack the bus up and head here for a couple of nights. This town had a caravan park, a pub, and a school but the park was great, it was cheap and the managers were a lovely couple, we loved a few days here. As soon as we pulled up a lorikeet flew down so the kids grabbed some bread and 1 flew straight down onto Chloe's arm and for the rest of our time there she was surrounded by her 'rainbow birds'. Lucy definitely didn't share her sisters love of birds, at one point she was sitting outside eating a piece of bread (not the smartest thing to do!) and a bird flew down onto the edge of her chair, she threw her bread as far as she could and started screaming until I came and scared the bird away, it was very funny! but on our final day she was starting to feed them just as long as they didn't touch her.

We spent the next day catching up on the washing and Lucy did a heap of school work. Yes we made her do school work during the school holidays!

Later that day we had some friends from home arrive who were on a 3 week holiday and had a couple of kids around the same ages as ours. They just finished setting up and we started to get the fire going when out of nowhere the rain came! Luckily it didn't last long and we had an enjoyable night around the fire with a few drinks. The next day was spent not doing very much at all, Brad must have 'eaten something bad' the night before and struggled for most of the day. It definitely didn't have anything to do with the couple of trips made to the pub the night before.

Bruce is not the 1st bus Brad has fitted out. About 4 years ago he bought a bus off ebay and converted it into a motorhome, we couldn't sell our business so after a couple of years we sold the bus. We have often spoken about how amazing it would be if we ran into it somewhere during our trip....

Later that afternoon Brad & I left the kids with our friends and went for a drive to Rubyvale to see if any of our sapphires were worth getting cut & polished. As we drove past a caravan park in Rubyvale our old bus was in there! We still can't believe that after only 1 1/2 weeks on the road we ran into our old bus!!!

We did a slow pack up the next morning and headed back to Emerald to do a big grocery shop. Lesson learnt here, we didnt think to do a grocery shop in Emerald on the way thru earlier in the week and supplies at Rubyvale were very limited so we had been living on the bare essentials for the past few days.

This is my favourite photo of Chloe!