My daughter, Abs, loves dinosaurs. While I know that it is mainly little boys that are fascinated by these prehistoric creatures, she just can't get enough of them. She is 6, but reads her dinosaur encyclopedia for fun every night. I heard about the Dinosaur Park somewhere and we finally decided to make a visit out there today.
It was about an hour and a half out there and it was a really small park, but the girls loved it. Abbie thought she was in dinosaur heaven. They have a small gift shop with almost every imagineable dinosaur product out there. I thought we had seen it all, but there were a lot of new items we had yet to set eyes on. Gave me some great ideas for gifts for the 5 nephews we have.
A main selling point for me about the park was the clean bathrooms! Ever since Junior, I seem to not be able to go anywhere without checking out the local restrooms, and I was quite pleased to find all three of them sparkling clean and fully stocked with soap and toilet paper.
We took a picnic lunch along and ate before we took a look around the park. They had a small playset for the children and also two digging spots. They had hidden replicas of dinosaur bones and fossils under sand and provided tools for the kids to unearth fossils, etc. The girls had a great time looking up what they had uncovered. There was a small trail (I believe they said it was about 1/4 mile) that roamed around the small park and had statues of dinosaurs with informational plaques in front of them. Abs knew most of what was already on the plaques, but was excited to read them and correct us if we mispronounced the names. (Her Montessori school did a whole month of dinosaur study as well)
Abs and I walked the path twice looking at the dinosaurs and taking pictures. Junior was a great sport and since the path was stroller friendly, we didn't have to break out the ERGO (my favorite baby carrier besides the Kozy Carrier!)
Anyway, for the $20 that it cost us to get in, we had a good time. I don't know if there is enough there to make a repeat visit any time soon, but the dinosaur songs in the background were a nice touch. It was a nice clean park (even my kids were commenting about how clean the bathrooms were, guess I have rubbed off on them), not very busy but was a nice change of pace from the local area.
....Not to mention we stopped off at IKEA on the way home and I found a new entertainment center. Of course I want it stained a little darker to match the shrank, but hopefully DH can do all of that this week!
