Funny start to another fun day

Although we abandoned our pre-paid RV park site for our awesome (undeveloped) in-park campsite, the RV park WAS on the way to our planned activities in the TRNP North Unit today. So we decided to stop by the RV park in the morning just to take showers! The photos below are us walking to our $100 showers, while Josie waited for us in our (otherwise unused) park spot.

Then we drove an hour-ish out of our way to visit the super-random Paul Broste Rick Museum. This is another one of those “personal collection turns museum” stops. It’s a little long in the tooth (dated), but a nice young gal has recently taken it over and is in the process of updating everything. Actually some nice pieces, and we just love rocks and rock collections in general, so we are pretty easy to please. He had quite the collection of rock and mineral spheres, which was pretty impressive. Even the building was made with hand-set field stones.

The rock that is orange under the fluorescent lights is actually the yellow-green piece below. She is still working in identifying just what it is comprised of, but she suspects obsidian (for the glassiness) and sulfur (for the color).

These green stones aren’t rocks at all - they are melted glass, left over from a local Coca-Cola bottling plant that had burned down. When they cooled, they had formed the interior white crystals.

Hundreds of specimens, many quite rare, but my favorite was the humble, quite ordinary light blue fluorite. Go figure!

Yes, we are the types of travelers that can appreciate a few roadside oddities. On to the North Unit!