Dannic, The Prince of Cats

Posted by Dannic on July 16th, 2006 in General

Not all of my vacation was quite as exciting as the first day of Travel.

Saturday consisted mostly of an Auction.  It is one of the few things we try not to miss anymore when we go to Missouri.  We get some really good deals on antiques and the parents have started up a little antique booth here in Florida with some of the things they have bought.  Besides they are rather fun.  Never know what kind of deals you are going to get.

We headed to Park Hills(Flat River) to tour the mines on sunday.  We were not quite sure they were open when we left but it wasn’t too far away so we decided to take a chance.  The mines at Park Hills wasn’t much more than a museum.  You can’t actually go into the mine itself since it is completely flooded with water.  But it does have some interesting history.  For us as well, since we have a few ancestors who actually worked some of the local mines.

The tour of the museum was fairly boring.  It would have been better if we skipped the tour and just looked around on our own.  Great specimens of the types of ore they could find and what they were actually looking for.  Galena was the ore that was being mined there.  It was the source for lead.  But they would occasionally find copper, silver and gold as well.

The kids picked up some great rocks to add to their collections.  I added a few myself so that I can share them with the scouts.

Since we couldn’t actually tour that mine itself we headed up to Bonne Terre mine.  We got a great tour of that mine.  Probably on of the best tours I’ve been on in a long time. Took lots of pictures but most of them didn’t turn out since I wasn’t familiar with how to take low light pictures with the digital camera at the time.  I figured it out but not till we visited Merimac Caverns.

Bonne Terre mine has lots of interesting facts about it.  It is currently a hot dive spot and the largest cave dive in the US.  They have done several shows in the mine itself and the tour is just great.  Wish I had figured out the camera while we were there.

The history in the mine was phenominal.  To imagine my grandfather working in one of the mines and see what his job was is just amazing.

I have some photos of the mines and if you are interested I’ll send you a link to them.