Today there was an estate and rock collection auction in Nampa, Idaho. Thinking that it would be a fun family activity my wife and I gather up the kid early in the morning and headed to the sale. I figured I would purchase some materials to add to my collection so the day before I made sure I had some cash. One hundred dollars should be enough to get quite a bit of nice rocks right? Boy was I in for a surprised.

When we arrived at the sale we found that there were many boxes and buckets of rocks and many single pieces that were nice specimens. The auction started five minutes early at 9:55. It was explained that they would do a table of boxes at a time and the high bidder would have choice of the boxes. Most of the boxes contained material that could be found within 50 to 100 miles of the sale. The surprise came when the bidding immediately went to eighty dollars a box. After the first round the auctioneer started over and the bidding went up to seventy dollars a box. This continued until the price per box got down to fifteen dollars. Finely the price was getting to my level. Just then the auctioneer had the boxes pushed to the next table and started over. The second table’s bidding started at $170 per box. This bid came from a man in the back of the crowd. When he won I could not believe it when he asked “What was I bidding on”. This is the point where I realized I was way out of my league. These high prices continued the whole time I was at the sale. At 11:30 it was time leave without purchasing one rock.

After leaving the auction we went to Stringer’s Gem Shop to purchase a couple of 100 grit sanding belts. Actually I this was not planned but when we were in the area my wife assumed that was where we were going. When she mentioned it I figured it would be a good idea to get the belts since I go threw them fairly fast. When we arrived at the gem shop the stringers were surprised that we were not at the auction. We told them of the situation they explained that they figured that would be the case and that was why they weren’t there. All of us had a good laugh and conversation about the auction.

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