A Visit To Phillipsburg

Gary and Patsy, Peg and I and Rachel, Erin, Jennifer and her kids headed to the old mining town of Phillipsburg. We had an interesting time looking for sapphires at one of the shops called the Sapphire Gallery. They let you pick your bag of dirt and then they put it into a screening unit and immerse it into water. It is then dumped onto a table and you sift through the dirt to pull out any sapphires. Peg and I found quite a few gems and put them into a provided vile. After we picked through the dirt (several times), we were taken to the jewelry section of the store and the woman there looked at what we had in the vile and determined which were actually sapphires and which was not. We ended up with 4.6 ounces of sapphires that were usable for jewelry. Pretty cool.

We also stopped into the Sweet Palace, a huge candy store. I like to call it a diabetics NIGHTMARE!!! They did have some sugar free candy too. I had a good time selecting from their assortment of hundreds of jelly bean flavors.

We finished off our visit by heading to the local malt shop for a few Huckleberry shakes. Huckleberries are very popular and abundant here. Man, were they good! This store looked like we had been transported back into the 60's. It was nostalgic, to say the least. We all enjoyed our treats and our visit to Phillipsburg.