Lightning Ridge Day 3 July 11th 2023

 Lightning Ridge Day 3 July 11th 2023

A day doing not much, just wandering around.

Found a decent coffee shop, The Bumble Bee or some such, run by the people who had the other one out on the main street last time was here

Poked our noses into John Murray’s Art Gallery, ticked of all the ones we had, added some more to the collection...

The Ghan. Artist : John Murray, Lightning Ridge NSW
Should have bought this one as well... Next time!

Visited the Walk in Mine, which is just a walk in ... and out, checked out the layers of sandstone and opal bearing siltstone, watched the video, watched another video, perused the shop. 

Judy on  the jack-hammer. Walk in Mine, Lightning Ridge NSW

Visited some real opal shops in the main street, one had really nice settings and mostly proper solid opals, with a solid price tag, the next had almost ok settings, lots of pieces at more reasonable prices, and then there was the original one. The jewellery pieces look like they are the originals as well. Most of the opal on display is doublets and triplets, which are basically rubbish, lots of said rubbish cheaply priced for the tourists and a few good stones on display for the punters to gawp at.

After lunch we had to round out the car door tours, by doing the Red CDT and the Yellow CDT. The biggest change is that Amigos Castle is now totally obscured from the street, so if you want a snap you have pay to go in and look. Done it twice already when it was free, so thanks but no..

The other big change is that the faux church used in some totally forgotten film was blown away a few years back by a mini hurricane. We couldn’t even find where it had been. Maybe it fell into the old open-cut pit on Lunatics' Hill?

Lunatic Hill open-cut mine. Lightning Ridge NSW