There's Gold in Them Thar Hills

 Dahlonega, Ga was the site of the first major gold rush in the United States.  This town served as our base for exploring the mountains of North Georgia. On our first day in Dahlonega we visited the Consolidated Gold Mine.  Our visit included a tour of a portion of the abandoned mines.  This was such a neat tour.  I really enjoyed it.  We saw some of the equipment used to mine gold and were told how the mining process developed over time.  They had even excavated a piece of machinery from the turn of the century that still worked (and they turned it on to prove that it still worked).  The echo that that machine made was something else.  I cannot imagine working in the mine with several of those machines going at the same time.  It would be loud. The mine tour was probably my favorite thing we did while on vacation.  I feel that we all learned a lot about the history of Georgia and about mining in general.

 Here we are seeing a demonstration of how workers used to mine the gold by hand.  .

 There were lots of bats hibernating in the mines.

 After our tour, we tried to strike it rich by panning for gold.  It was a lot harder than it looked.  I think most of the gold that we had probably escaped our pans.  We still ended up with a few specks of gold each- which we got to keep.  No nuggets.  Still, the kids thought that it was cool that they found some gold.