Our day trip this past weekend took us to the small town of Glen Rose, Texas, population ~2000.

Fossil Rim

The first place we hit was Fossil Rim Park, which is wildlife park where you can feed the animals from your car as you tour the grounds.  I had done my research and found that they keep the place open for 2 hours after they let the last car in.  One would deduce that it then takes about 2 hours to get through the park. 

My research also led to the discovery that, indeed, we had a coupon in our Entertainment Passbook for One FREE Child Admission.  Perfect.  Benjamin is still free because he could care less about what happens around him.  It took us about 2 hours to get there from Plano including a quick stop for lunch.  Ogre went in and bought the admission as well as a bag of animal feed that cost us about 8 bucks.

The first animal we meet is an ostrich.  First, let me tell you that I’ve only had bad experiences with ostriches, I think they’re mean SOBs.  One bit my palm when I fed it at the State Fair and I never tried to feed or interact with one again. So here we are, face to face with another ostrich, it’s the first animal we meet on our drive, so everyone’s excited to feed the animal.  This ostrich was not hear to play.  He wanted some food, he knew the drill and he just stuck his long old neck INSIDE our car to try to get the bag sitting on the center console.  And he would not stop staring us down.  Ogre finally threw some feed away from the car to get it away.  I laughed my ass off at the sight of this!!  Poor Ogre had this ostrich staring him down and kept trying to reach its head in to the car and Ogre is trying to hide the food.  Ahhh, I loved it.  I still laugh.

So once we got away from the sketch ostrich, we drove around and Mina was excited to match up the animals with her little guide about the animals and then Papa would read what it said about the animals.  We founds so many different animals and were very impressed about how sweet and tame many of them were.

THEN, we meet another ostrich, on my side this time and I had Benji up front with me.  Man, those things are crazy.  I don’t why they have this reputation of being scared and sticking their holes in the ground.  These ones had no issues intimidating humans.  I went into mother mode and had to “protect my young.”  I shielded Benji from crazy ostrich while telling Ogre to GO!  But alas, Ogre was in Karma mode and instead, happily snapped away with the camera.  He finally decided to drive off when the thing started pecking at our car.  Save the car, forget about the children.

There were several of these Deer that were very sweet, yet, very pushy.  They would see a car and I guess it’s Pavolovian, they would walk up to get food and it was pretty difficult to get them to go away. 

The neatest part for everyone was getting to see zebras and giraffes up close.  We followed park instructions and did not hand feed the zebras, but through the feed on the ground.

Another good laugh I got was getting a good picture of the giraffe picking his nose with his tongue. 

Ogre and Mina both got to hand feed the giraffes and they really thought that was very cool!

By the time we hit the Outlook area and Gift Shop, it’d been 2 hours.  As we drove up to this area we saw a sign warning us that there was still another HOUR of driving after this point.  WTF??  Another hour??  Ack, we still wanted to go to the Dinosaur Valley State Park.  We decided to forego this part and hightail it (the best we could, obviously) through the rest of the park. 

We did not stop to feed as many animals as we did before and just leisurely drove the rest of the way and stopped here and there to look at the cheetahs and rhinocerous, but it only took us about 20 minutes to finish up, so that was good. 

This was definitely a fun trip and well worth our time and money.  Only Benjamin could have cared less, but we’ll be back when he’s older.

Dinosaur Valley State Park

Next we drove over to Dinosaur Valley State Park.  It’s only about a 5-10 minute drive from Fossil Rim.  We stopped to look at the dinosaur replicas and learned some new things.  For example, what I’ve always called Brontosaurus are called Apatosaurus.  Who knew?  Also, while they have replicas of the Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, these are not the dinos that left tracks here.  The tracks are from the Cretaceous Period and were left by Acrocanthosaurus (the one they thought was T rex) and Pleurocoelus (the one that they thought was an Apatosaurus, or what I call a Brontosaurus).

Fast Forward, we went to Blue Hole #1 first.  Let me tell you that if you’re goal is to do some fun hiking, this is a cool place to start. When your goal is to see some dinosaur fossil tracks and you’ve got an 18 month old, this part is low yield.  It’s a mildly treacherous (definitely doable, though) steep downward climb to the creek bank where you do get to see a few (we found 2) dinosaur tracks.  But then it’s the same treacherous hike back up.

The best place for seeing tracks is #2.  It’s a nice, easy paved walk to some stairs that lead you to the river, that you have to cross, to get to the tracks.  I don’t know what happens when the river is up, but for us, it was just walking across rocks to get there.  Another good tip: WEAR GOLASHES OR DUCK BOOTS!  We thought ahead and for Mina, she had the best time splashing around in areas where the water was shallow, which was quite a few places!!

There is an impressive area where a chase and kill site is fossilized.  But even better than that, there was just a lot of areas to explore and roam around with.  Ogre and I just kept good sight of the kids, particularly Benji and we had a great time in this area!

We did check out Sites #3 and #4, but unfortunately, #3 has pretty much eroded away and there isn’t anything to see.  And site #4 was screened by Ogre and Mina and they found that it was not feasible with Benji and little more arduous for our day trip.

While they were checking out #4, I was able to get a good look at the campsites, and I think that we’ll definitely be back to camp and hike about this park.  It has a great set up with each campsite having electricity and a picnic table with fire pit and some even have BBQ pits as well.  There is also a central location for bathrooms and showers and some playgrounds.  So you’re roughing it, but not ROUGHING it. 

And to make a great day even better, we stopped to eat dinner in town at a great little BBQ joint that was thouroughly enjoyed by all of us, it’s called The Ranch House and was quite tasty, you can read about that here.

All in all, I would highly recommend this day trip to check out animals and dinosaur tracks, but it would also make for a fun weekend trip, too.

And so you can’t call me unfair or unbalanced, they have one of these on the way to the dinosaur park:

And, just for the record, I believe that both creationism and evolution are theories.  Theories, which I don’t believe can be justly denounced or proven, so I respect both positions. 

Details:

• Fossil Rim Park
• Pricing Calendar
• Dinosaur Valley State Park