How many tons of brachiopods should one woman have?
That was the question I was asking myself as I obsessively gathered them on my third visit to Fleming County, Kentucky, to visit Miss Vickie and Jim.
I have flown to Kentucky on my last 2 visits and that limits the amount of fossils I can bring home. I usually put as many in my carry on as I think TSA will tolerate and then I ship a large flat rate box home to myself. This time, however, I got covid antsy about my return flight and checked the cost of a one way car rental from Lexington, KY, to Sanford, FL.
Affordable!
Since I didn't decide to drive home until the last day I didn't have enough time to REALLY load up that economy car but I'll keep the fly/drive method in mind for my next trip.
We spent a few hours collecting horn coral in a creek close to Vickie's home. I'm amazed at how much I've found here on the past 2 trips and then to still find beautiful pieces.
Size ranges from very small to the size of the 3 in my hand and bigger and many have beautiful areas of crystals and geode-type vugs.
I didn't find as much branch coral this time but I found a lot of beautiful little brachiopod geodes that I literally picked out of the front of the road cuts with my fingers. Once in a while I used a small hammer and chisel but only to loosen the soft surrounding matrix.
They are little gems and I found quite a few on this visit.
The crazy thing is we only visited a few road cuts and creeks.
There's a lot to explore!
This road cut had an ATV track along the side so I hiked up to check it out. Luckily there wasn't anything special because I was a little nervous being up that high.
Ground level is more my speed.
Fossil hunting isn't pretty, lol.
At least I didn't have to wash all my rocks this time; I just loaded up the rental and headed home. The drive home surely wasn't fun: I left Lexington at 10:15 AM and pulled up to my house st 12:15 AM the next day, but I think I could handle that once a year.
