A Day in the Jurassic Jungle

Once upon a time, there was a family.  A family of four, the eldest having moved away to a more exciting future on a lake.  With power boats.  We couldn't compete with that level of excitement.

Or so we thought!

Having ventured far from home on dusty roads, we discovered a hidden, secret gate.

What secrets did it hold?  Why were the bars so large and menacing?

Seriously?  We hadn't recently seen any dinosaurs in these parts.  Eh, we'll take our chances and go in.  I thought they'd go for the smallest first anyway.  She can't run as fast.  I'm safe.
 

 You'd better take a close look, Alice.  You're the littlest around here.  You'll be the first to go!

 

Hmm, it's that the length of the apatosaurus' femur, I think I might be easy prey myself!  

Luckily, Laura knew that an apatosaurs is an herbivore.  I'm pretty meaty, so phew!  Let's take a scary walk and hope that everyone is an herbivore.  One final family photo in case we don't make it back.

 

Screeching through the air came this guy. 

I don't know what it is.  I had no time to read the informative signs.  He may have been eyeing me as lunch!  Movin' right along!

 We walked a little further.  There were many common plants identified.  If we were for some reason stranded within these high walls, we discovered that we could burn the lichen on the trees as fuel, cooking up a tasty meal of cattails.  We could even have finished it off with dessert of wild raspberries, saskatoons and low-bush cranberries.

If it weren't for the loud, large, scary dinosaurs, it wouldn't be so bad.

At least these two were preoccupied with their own battle and not interested in a meaty, slow-running homo sapien.  We watched their struggle for a while.  It was exciting!  Who would win?  The fierce, knobby guy on the right, or the loud huge guy on the left?   And would the winner then look for someone else to fight when it was done?

Time to move on again.  We did not want to know the answer to that!

Luckily our next encounter with a peaceful veggie-loving guy.  

Coming at him from another angle, we noticed that he had a few problems of his own though.  

If you look closely, he has a smaller creature attacking him.  One with sharp teeth and two more friends on the ground moving in for the kill. 

What kind of a vicious world had we wandered into?

Flat teeth usually means an herbivore, but with a sharp pointy nose, we didn't stick around to find out if he was friendly or not.  He sounded pretty mean, and even the smaller ones were still many times my own weight.  

We left him alone and continued our walk along the boardwalk.  The problem with what could have been a peaceful Sunday afternoon walk was that we were surrounded with terrible sounds.  As we looked into the growth, this jabberwocky charged out at us!

Aargh!

With his puffy black lips, and black snakey tongue, once again we didn't stick around to figure out what his eating habits were.  Or his mood.

We walked 2 km of paths before we finally found a truly friendly dinosaur.  He allowed Alice to sit on him and we could pet him safely. 




Having made it out alive, we rejoiced with each other and went on our merry way. 

As we left the danger zone, we retreated to our home, where this is one of the most dangerous creatures we encounter.

  The end. 

(This adventure was to the Jurassic Park, outside of Gibbons, AB)

I've tried to do a scheduled weekly blog posting before, and I'm going to try again. Maybe I'll never learn, but I don't give up hope.

Hope is a good thing, right?

Rosa and her sister have started a weekly "Travel Tuesdays" link party and I'll see how often I'm a part of it.