The Monkeys go exploring!

The other Monday I had some spare vacation time built up from last year, so rather than lose it to the company I decided to take it.

Vicky and I had been hearing about a fun place to go since we first moved down here in 2003. It's a nice state park down by Glen Rose, Texas. Dinosaur Valley State Park

It was a bit of a drive for us, we ended up over four hours round trip on the road with stops. Of course, with Vicky and I, three monkeys, two large dogs, and enough equipment and food for a multi month expedition to Africa the minivan was a little loaded.

We were pretty surprised at the terrain change once we got down there. We went from flat and boring, (and I grew up in Kansas) to hills, trees, and rivers.

We even decided to take the mutts with us. Of course they were none to please about having to wear not only their chest harness but also the dreaded Halti.



Right after the entrance to the park they have two fiberglass dinosaurs that were donated after a 60's vintage World Fair. The Monkeys thought these were rather fascinating and really wanted to get up close and climb on them although that wasn't permitted.














Our first stop was along the river where there were supposed to be some dinosaur track that had been fossilized into the stone. The ones that were exposed to air though were reported to be pretty weathered and somewhat hard to see as you can tell from this picture.



This track is a lot better and was easily spotted. From the information available at the park this belonged to a relative of the tyrannosaur.



These next two are either erosion marks in the river bed or possibly the sauropod tracks that were in the area.





Both Vicky and I were more than taken with the little river that runs through here, The Paluxy. We were both trying to figure out what it would take to stick a house on the side of the bluff and retire to here. My answer was a winning lotto ticket.. We both thought it would be a nice place to live, trees, shade, a year around river full of fish, supposedly lots of deer. We could both think of lots of worse places to live.















We managed to get to the main track site by crossing the river at a low water area. This was an adventure in itself with three small children and two large WATER HATING dogs. We had to hop from rock to rock. Most of the time this involved Mom or Dad, a small child of one or the other, and a dog all trying to stand on a rather small rock in mid river. Most of the time, I just gave the dog the boot and nudged them into the river, (mind you it wasn't more than 6" to 8" deep in spots). Both dogs gave me looks like, "If you wanted a dog that's dumb enough to play in the water you should have gotten yourself and brain dead Labrador".

The main area had some fairly impressive tracks!

My what big POINTY toes you have, this was obviously from a carnivore.





This is a mixed trail with some sauropod and carnivore tracks.



And here are three very good nicely preserved carnivore tracks. These were in an area that was roped off to keep folks out.







Overall this was a really fun day trip. We are already making plans for going back and possibly camping overnight if we think the monkeys will make it. We are going to get them used to tent camping in the back yard first. I'd rather just have to bring them in from the back yard at 0-dark-30 than have to pack everything up and drive 90+ miles at that time of night.

Did you know, Texas is windy?

I don't mean that Texans are full of hot air or anything--just that this state is a mite BREEZY! Goodness, last weekend was a bit much. Winds in excess of 60mph, a 3hr dust storm, and more housing damage than I would have thought possible.

Yes, lots of straight line wind damage here last week. We even took some, though all things considered, it could have been a LOT worse. Many houses in the west part of town had parts of their roofs stripped down to bare plywood! Dave was out on a hike that afternoon, and says he had to dodge flying debris for most of his hike. Shingles, fence parts, cardboard, plastic bags, and other assorted detritus.

Halfway through his hike, he dropped off one dog, Charlie, who was tired of dodging the wind driven missiles. That's when Dave spotted the shingle damage to our southern roof line. The neighbors on both sides had it much worse! Dave shinnied up the ladder and managed to nail/glue down all the offending shingles on our roof, so I don't think we will need to file. However, we did lose our flagpole, and the side view mirror on the van, which got whacked by the flagpole on the way down. Aargh!

By evening, the wind had died down a bit, and two out of three Monkeys decided to brave the breeze and 'get flown like a kite' on the Grassy Knoll. Charlie even went back out, but you can see in the pics he wasn't too happy.

Pics of the two Monkeys:

Various bits of damage including neighborhood roofs, and the flagpole.