Enjoying a family dinosaur day

After weeks of soccer practices, games and meetings our weekday evenings and weekends are pretty full.

My husband and I love that our boys enjoy sports, but four nights a week of practice with both of their games on Saturday mornings takes up a lot of our regular free time. I have missed a lot of their practices due to meetings, work obligations or just plain terrible weather conditions, but I haven’t missed a game. I enjoy seeing them

learn new skills and improve practice after practice and game after game, but even then it’s nice to have a weekend off.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the boys didn’t have any games on Saturday so I suggested to my husband that we go down to Vernal, Utah, and see the dinosaur fossils. My sons, Matthew, 9, and John, 7, love dinosaurs and I figured they would love to see real-life fossils. The whole family was excited about the day trip.

It was also nice to get away from the rain, hail and overall depressing weather. It was sunny and about 64 degrees in Vernal that day. We made our way down Highway 191 and drove over the Flaming Gorge Dam. The boys thought that was amazing in itself and we told them how we had once taken them on a tour of the dam and they fed the fish at the bottom of the dam. Matthew somewhat recalled the experience, but John didn’t. We decided we would try and take another tour of the dam this summer so they can have the experience again. When we arrived in Vernal, we made our way to the Dinosaur National Monument so we could see the famous wall of bones.

After paying a $25 fee at the gate, we immediately pulled into Quarry Visitor Center where we found out we could ride a shuttle up to the Quarry Exhibit Hall, which is where the dinosaur fossils were at.

The boys were already excited because they could ride in a shuttle. Once at the wall of bones, I was overwhelmed. I had seen photographs of the wall, but none of them did it justice. I have never seen so many dinosaur fossils from different dinosaurs located in one place. It was amazing. You could even make out pieces such as the vertebra, femur, rib and skull. It was awesome.

Matthew and John just kept looking back and forth at all of the bones, trying to take it all in.

They were so excited to see all of them that we made our way through the exhibit pretty quickly. Their pace quickened even more when the realized that at the lower level they would have the opportunity to touch real dinosaur fossils.

I was also excited to touch a fossil. After we took in the wall of bones, we decided to take a short hike back to the visitor center to take in the scenery and look at other fossils.

Once we got back to the center, we decided to head back to Vernal and visit the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum. This didn’t disappoint us either. The museum had fossils, interactive kiosks for the boys and life-sized dinosaur replicas outside of the museum. While we were at the museum, a tooth fossil was discovered in the fossil discovery lab. The person who discovered the fossil cleaned it and brought it out for visitors to see.

It was an amazing and educational day that I’m sure our family will remember for years. I’m also sure we will return to those places again.