On Vacation!!!

We started our morning in Rock Springs and drove to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.  Dinosaur footprints at the dig site: (As always there are A LOT more photos on Facebook). We spent time exploring the musuem and we opted to take the dig site tour as well.  The collection was pretty awesome, but the lighting made some of the photos challenging, I guess that means you just have to go and check it out for yourself! The museum has a lot of acreage of the Morrison formation and the paleontologist who gave us the tour told us that they have so much more to explore, but they are short staffed. I think the boys are considering spending some time in Thermopolis ;).  Then, we continued north to Cody, Wyoming for the night.  The boys were ready to relax and hung out at our cabin while Allan and I went into town to eat and explore.  We had dinner at the ...

Today we drove from Craig, Colorado to Dinosaur, Colorado. We made a quick stop at the Dinosaur National Monument Park Information center and decided to head for the Utah area of the park.  The Dinosaur Quarry did not disappoint.  We also drove through some of the park and hiked some of the trails to the petroglyphs. The boys worked on their Junior Ranger Programs and were sworn in ad Junior Rangers before we left. We drove through the park and north to Rock Springs, Wyoming for the night. The mountains are beautiful, but the constant up and down and winding roads are something to get used to.  We noticed our ears popping and some of us had a little bit of altitude sickness, but it was worth it! 

We left Rapid City this morning and went straight to Hot Springs to the Mammoth Site.  You'll find another massive photo dump on Facebook from our visit there. Basically, the Mammoth Site is an area that was a sink hole where many mammoths died and were fossilized. They built a building around the dig Site and you can see the fossils still partially in the rock. Then... we hit the road, driving out of South Dakota and into Wyoming. Our GPS took us a different route than we originally planned, but it was shorter and gorgeous!  Instead of driving through Casper, we drove through Laramie.. which meant we could make a pit stop at the University of Wyoming Geological Musuem.... Again, you will find many more photos on Facebook ;). We continued to drive through the mountains, up and down through Wyoming and into Colorado. We saw ...

 We spent today in the Black Hills. Our first stop this morning was Reptile Gardens. Our family has been to the Black Hills a number of times, with our first trip being in 2008. We had a lot of fun showing our travel buddies some of our favorite places to explore today.    Our second stop was the Black Hills Institute in Hill City.  Dane sure has grown a lot since our last visit here!  There are over 1000 fossils at the institute and they also loan a number of their specimens out to other places. (Some of the fossils we saw at Reptile Gardens were on loan from the Institute).  There was a massive photo dump on Facebook today if you are looking for more of our pictures!  We spent some time checking out the shops in Hill City and then made our way to Mt Rushmore.  We managed not to get too drenched and ducked into the museum while it continued to rain!  The rain stopped as we were departing. On our way back to the hotel, we stopped to see possi...