Sitting on a gold mine?

This was the trickiest 4 by 6 yet, I cannot see how the next three months will go with even more pics!
I decided it was time to scrap my pics of our overnight stay at the cute little town of Julian. We were using Lonely Planet and whilst in San Deigo read about an inland detour we could take. We thought that this sounded like a good idea as we had mainly been staying on the coast. When we first arrived in Julian we thought it was a real one horse town and not worth the two hour detour , we also struggled to find accomodation for the night.
Luckily we found a cute inn called Apple Tree Inn and had al fresco stone baked pizzas across the road with a live country / blue grass band. It felt really authentic.
The next day after browsing the farmers market we found a cute little ranch that offered lots of activities. We went for gold panning and spent a few hours at it. This is what I have scrapped about.
We went to Ikea on Wednesday and I finally got me an easel for staging my layouts. I struggled to think of a colour scheme as we were all wearing different colours etc but went for green, gold and read. I stamped the title and bordered it in gold spotted ribbon. Then I matted the photo with gold acrylic paint. I rewrote my journalling three times - first on the original layout, then on a brown paper bag but it was only once it was written on white paper that it stood out enough. I was getting really bored of writing the same thing over again!

 The first inside secret section. A close-up of the panning and a medium shot of me panning for gold. I painted the chipboard embellishments gold to go with the theme.

 The inside page. I used more close-ups of the panning and cut the advert for the ranch out from a little booklet I picked up. I also journalled about the guy who taught us how to pan.

 Overall I am *quite* pleased with this layout. I think I would use this idea again if I had lots of pictures of one event.

Happy weekend! Back to school Monday - boo!