After a crack of dawn start to spot kangaroos we decided over breakfast to move on to our next destination a day earlier than planned as it had become clear that Archie was very interested in rocks and the next stop was the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge, so named because a farmer and his sheep were all killed by a lightning strike there many moons ago.
We drove back through Bourke and stopped for a quick squint at the Darling River. Ian said the rivers in this part of Australia run upside down with their mud on the top and he wasn't kidding, it was completely brown! 

The boys were very impressed with the technology at one of the roadside toilets where, for night time use, drivers have to shine their headlights on a specified spot to reflect and light up the toilets! We pressed on for another couple of hours until we came to Grawin, along a dirt road just outside Lightning Ridge where we had heard there was free camping at the Club in the Scrub.

The club was a splendid collection of ramshackle buildings huddled together with an area for camping at the back. The owners leave the, surprisingly smart, toilets open all the time for any campers to use and were incredibly friendly, as were the customers. The club itself boasts a golf course. There is no grass, just red dirt with flags sticking out of holes every so often, when we asked the owner  if it was an 18 hole course she said, "Yes, they just have to go round it twice!"  

There were posters on display for the upcoming Grawin show which featured fun events like Catch the Greasy Pig and Have Your Picture Taken With Figjam and his Teeth! 

While setting up camp Archie got tangled up with a very spiteful cactus but not nearly as caught up as Eddie managed to get trying to release him. Once Eddie was finally freed we went for something to eat in the pub. The only people around these parts are opal miners, most of whom have very small scale operations, a prospective miner will buy a claim, erect a shack on it, dig a hole and start trying to find his or her fortune.
 The food in the club was good and the customers were all keen to give Archie advice on specking (or noodling) for opals himself. The general public are permitted to rummage around in the huge tip of waste rock the miners dump when they have finished with it and sometimes people make worthwhile discoveries. We were told to look for a blue or black line in the rock called potch which is the substance the opals form in, then to break the rock open and see if there is anything inside.

 Armed with this information we headed off into Lightning Ridge in the morning for a look around, passing Stanley the emu a very impressive Big Thing made of metal and scrap VW Beetles. When we arrived we found there was far too much to fit in to one trip. There are mines open to the public, museums, shops, tours, markets and countless other attractions including The Big Opal (without doubt the most disappointing Big Thing to date)  so we limited ourselves to the market where Archie bought himself some opals, a museum and a driving tour of part of the mining area.

There is a huge open cut mine owned by a big business but it is surrounded by hundreds of little claims where individuals are scrabbling around hoping to get rich, the whole area is pockmarked with holes only big enough for one person to climb down fenced off with very rickety bits of fence - a landscape you would not want to wander around in the dark. The town is also dotted with old cement mixers which are used to clean the dirt and bits of rock off the opals, they are the symbol of the town as you can see in the first picture. 

We drove back to Grawin and stopped off in another pub, the Sheepyard Inn (this tiny area has three pubs all made up of old bits of scrap metal and this one had a railway carriage as a kitchen). The Sheepyard Inn was the centre of  a small huddle of shacks and sheds occupied by speculators, it was quite a cosmic little community and a lot of fun I could see why people might choose this alternative lifestyle if city life became too much or a relationship fell apart.
It was time for us to do some fossicking ourselves so we went to the rock dump and set to. We found a few little bits and Eddie got himself a very promising looking bit of rock with a big blue line all the way through the middle, it turned out only to be potch but it was very exciting all the same. 

We planned an early start as we had a long drive home the next day. As we settled in our tents it started to rain which is a real problem when the only access is a dirt road, not only does it become too slippery to drive on, the locals will not let you because you can mess the road up for them with ruts which will not go away for months. At about 5am it was really raining rather heavily so Ian woke us all up and we threw everything into the car and hightailed it out of there while we still could all soaking wet and still wearing what we had slept in. We finally got home in the mid afternoon after a 2300km round trip adventure.