Had a great time at the GPAA gold show, I got to meet a lot of real good people, where do I begin… Lets start with Bunk from BunksArizonaProspecting.com, what a great guy Bunk is!! Him and his wife Teri were there selling the Hermit Picks, the smaller Burrow Picks, Nuggetfinder Coils and much more, I got to meet Frank C…..He was there with Bunk selling his world famous hand crafted Ol’ Yeller drywashers…(olyeller.wordpress.com/) and not doing too bad I suspect, I got to meet Ruby from Footprints mapping at www.minerdiggins.com they were also very busy, but never busy enough not to have a word with you, several rows into it I met Bill Thompson of www.thompsondrywasher.com and we chatted for a bit, and I got to meet his family,that was very cool. All of these folks have something in common, in that they have all created something by hand that started from nothing and now all of them have viable and selling products…now that’s America!!
I noticed as I weaved my way through the crowd that the venue was just the right size because there was never an empty booth, folks were 4-5 deep as they moved along down the rows, I took a methodical approach and started on the north side and went to each and every booth and wouldnt you know it at the very first booth I bought some leg levelers for my bluebowl and a micro-mini sluice. I saw Tom Massie getting set up for whatever he was going to do, I had the perfect opportunity to chat with him and take a photo but I had bigger fish to fry…I was on a mission…to find “The Legend” now I wasn’t too sure he’d be there but I was hoping and by the time I got just passed the middle of the show there he was….BOO-COO!!! now I was stoked! I chatted it up with ol Boo-Coo for probably 20 minutes and what a great guy he was, and friendly as ever.
So so far this GPAA show has been well worth the 10 schillings it cost me to get in and I still got a few rows to go so I make my way over to the back, where the second GPAA booth was at and I tracked down my buddy Dominic Ricci….I dont remember what he does at the GPAA….. he’s bigtime…but cool. We were talking for a minute or two then some dude cuts in and starts talking about getting hit by a car in Nome Alaska and barely surving etc,etc, then the crowds came rolling in and the booth got busy again, so I moved on to another popular booth where some cat named Grampa Howie or something was demonstrating this mini flow table, it was very cool but I didnt buy one, for fear of having to carry it all day.. Instead I waited till I got home and ordered one from The Gold RushTrading Post. As usual Denise and Larry at www.GoldRushTradingPost.com took care of ol’ Bucket and now I cant wait to try this thing out in our next video. I also caught a bit of Kevin Hoagland’s Minelab seminar, it was standing room only and he was tearing it up. So If anyone ever gets the opportunity to check out one of these GPAA shows, I can tell you first hand it was a fun time to be had by all.
