TUESDAY 26 MAY     LORNE STATION

We left at 8am for the Grawin. Another early start for John! The lure of opal actually had him almost bounding out of bed.

The road past Lorne to the highway was graded yesterday and was great now.

We were at the heaps by 9am.

A lot of trucks came in to dump through the morning, including the old red and black one that all the experienced noodlers got excited about. We joined the others around the load as it was dumped, like crows around a rubbish bin. After working on that heap for a while, I think we’d found a couple of good bits.

Went down to Truck to get our lunch about 12.30.

One of the regulars – T – sold John a jar of very nice pieces. I thought he’d brought them out for D to have a look at, but D had decided to have a rest day at camp today. I suspected that might have been related to the presence at camp of a rather attractive young South African backpacker! Our gain. We did some haggling over the price, as expected, and in the end he came down from $300, we went up from $150, and settled on $200. Three of the pieces in the jar had a really good red flash in them.

By mid afternoon we were weary, so drove back to camp, stopping to get firewood along the way.

D seemed to be rather skeptical about our purchase – until he looked at the pieces! He offered to buy a good piece that John had found, but we were not selling.

Both tired tonight, and to bed soon after tea.