Establishing my new fossil home base in Kentucky

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.

Most of our time was spent collecting brachiopods in the road cuts. This is easy collecting as it's possible to pick up brachiopods while walking along the base of the road cut.

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.