Another Fitlow Friday Field Trip

This year, the girls are in school Mondays through Thursdays, leaving Fridays free for our semi-homeschooling, quasi-unschooling, fun field trip Fridays! Last semester, I was pretty good about planning something fun to do on Fridays. We went to Red Butte Gardens. We went to the zoo. We went to This is the Place Heritage Park. We went to the Museum of Ancient Life.

Then, somewhere along the way, Fridays got busy and we weren't doing as many cool fieldtrips on Fridays. So this Friday, I decided to hike up the britches and get back into the fray (how's that for mixing metaphors?!).

Miss D and I decided that it was "dinosaurs" for this past Friday. We've done the Museum of Ancient Life and, while the girls could happily go back there a hundred times (it is cool, I admit!), I wanted to try something different. I considered the Utah Fieldhouse of Natural History in Vernal, but decided I didn't want to try getting everyone moving early enough to make the two-hour drive there worth it. Also, our friends from Steamboat had tried to go there recently and it had been, alas, closed (of course, it WAS Sunday and this IS Utah, but still!).

So I settled on the Ogden Dinosaur Park. I'll tell you up front that I have no pictures. While shepherding my 3 kids through an outdoor dinosaur park is not as hard as it used to be, I still wasn't up for trying to do it while lugging along my camera.

We had a great time! The kids loved the little indoor museum. They have a REALLY cool animatronics dinosaur exhibit upstairs that shows a young T-Rex trying to eat a couple of triceratops babies for a snack and a triceratops mama defending her babies. The girls and I sat in front of that exhibit for a good half an hour, talking about what the T-Rex wantd to do and why, and how the mama was acting to scare off the T-Rex, and how one baby was hiding behind a tree and the other one was sticking close to mama, and all kinds of stuff like that. It was really fun and cool.

The rest of the museum was ok. It's very small, but they do have some good fossils there. But the real attraction is the outdoor dinosaur park. They have a large (I don't know how many acres, but it's big!) outdoor park with water features and hiking paths. Scattered throughout the park are very real-looking life-size dinosaurs of different kinds. There are plaques all around telling about the different dinosaurs. In the pond, there were ancient duck dinosaurs, apparently some kind of ancestor of modern ducks, as well as modern mallard ducks swimming around them.

They also have recorded noises for the "jungle" that was Utah at the time and a lot of the different dinosaur noises (imagined, I suppose, but still cool). It was a little chilly the day we went and we had left our jackets in the car, so we didn't stay long, but it was still a great afternoon.

Since we were already in Ogden, we decided to go to Union Station in downtown Ogden and see their train museum. All the way up to Ogden, along I-84, we had been watching and counting the various trains coming and going. The train tracks run right along the highway and the girls love watching for the trains. The train museum was quite interesting. We saw lots of artifacts from the heydey of train travel. The girls got to climb up into the passenger compartment of an old steam train. We saw a really long multi-room model train display, mimicking the great meeeting of the trans-continental railroad. There was a great room with real railroad equipment including the front end of a locomotive where the girls could go inside and blow the whistle! There was also a set of model trains the girls could play with.

We also got to see the FrontRunner trains coming into Ogden from Salt Lake. Soon the FrontRunner will go all the way from Ogden down to Provo.

Anyway, all-in-all we had a great day. We met G'pa Larry and Daddy-J for a yummy barbecue dinner in Salt Lake at Pat's Barbecue and then headed home, happy and tired!

It's good to be back on track with the Friday Fieldtrips. Stay tuned for more adventures in the months to come!