After seeing the Cash And Treasures marathon on the Travel Channel, my wife and I and been looking for an opportunity to go to one of those places they had on the show.
I am scheduled to run a marathon in Virginia Beach, VA in March, and I noticed that North Carolina wasn’t that far away, and I thought that one or two of those places were in North Carolina. I checked out the Cash And Treasures website and found that there was Emerald mining in a place called Hiddenite, NC. And it was only a 6 hour drive from Virginia Beach. Way cool! We had just seen the Emerald hunting show again recently during a New Years day marathon. My wife liked the idea of going to hunt emeralds!
So the plan is to take a 2 day drive to Virginia Beach, run the marathon on Sunday. Then Monday we will drive to the Hiddenite area, and check into a hotel. Then go digging for emeralds on Tuesday. And if we have fun, we will hang around Wednesday and spend another day digging for emeralds.
Seeing that the digging will be only a couple days after running the marathon, I am guessing that my legs will be sore. But which each marathon I have run, my legs have recovered faster, so I will probably be okay.
I saw there was another place down in Georgia with an amethyst mine. But my wife thought the emerald mining would be enough. On the Cash And Treasures, they seems to find other types of gemstones also. The website lists aquamarine, sapphire, garnet, topaz, amethyst, citrine, rutile, tourmaline and hiddenite as other stones that can be found.
They have different types of permits. I plan to get the combo permit which would allow us to do everything (digging, creeking, sluicing).
