January 18, 2005 - Drive to the Hill Country in Texas

After a quick breakfast of hot oatmeal (maple sugar and apple cinnamon, maple sugar and banana, maple sugar and cinnamon roll-you get the idea), we drove down to Beth and Audie's place to pick up Lois. We were not exactly in an all-fired hurry to get going because I was rather hoping to dilly dally long enough to miss the morning rush hour traffic. So I took a shower (even the kid's shower in their house was larger than the one in our trailer), checked our email, and otherwise fooled around until about 10 o'clock, when we finally got the show on the road.

Having been warned about I-35 by Hank and Priscilla in the directions to their house, I circled warily around downtown Dallas to the west and then headed southwest on US 67. Route 67 was a wide 4 lane divided road at first, but then declined into a typical rural 2-lane highway. We turned south on US 281 and suddenly I saw a sign that said "Dinosaur Valley State Park" with an arrow that pointed off into the boondocks. Well, as far as I was concerned, there was Serendipity just slapping me in the face again.

To be specific, the landscape looked similar to some kind of PBS special I watched on fossilized dinosaur footprints that had been found in some old riverbed. I was so enthusiastic about this that I unilaterally decided to turn around and follow the sign to the west. Monika and Lois thought I was nuts when I started muttering about dinosaur tracks as we went careening off into the wilderness-perhaps they didn't believe the bit about smelling the scent of old dinosaur in the air. I persevered in my Quixotic Quest despite disbelief and much good-natured derision from my passengers. Along the way we passed a curious roadside exhibit for the "Creation Evidence Museum", which I gathered was the local religious competition to the evidence of the ancient dinosaur tracks in the state park. That made me think we were on the right track. It's kind of like when you see Wendys and Hardys fast food joints on a commercial strip, you know a competing McDonalds can't be far away, and basically we had just passed a "dinosaurs never existed" museum so I expected to find the competing "dinosaurs walked here" park somewhere close by. That was fortunate because the first signs to the park didn't have any mileage listed on them and I had no idea how far off this park was. Even given the encouragement of the creationist museum I was just on the verge of giving up the chase when about 10 miles out of town we finally found the dinosaur park

The admission fee turned out to be $5 apiece, however, which gave us some pause, and I saw 2 huge fiberglass dinosaur statues fighting over cars in a parking lot, which made it look rather more like an amusement park than a serious scientific site. But after weighing the pros and cons, we finally paid and drove in so that we could at least view the evidence first hand.

The most clear cut example of these ancient dinosaur tracks had been relocated to an exhibit area right behind the entrance station, and we spent a bit of time viewing that and the explanatory material in a side room of the entrance station. I was surprised how valuable these tracks were to scientists in not only refining their understanding of how dinosaur feet had really looked, but also in estimating the size and walking speed of these gigantic beasts. Fascinating how much information you could squeeze from a set of tracks, and that made it even more tragic that the first footprints discovered in the area were carved out of the riverbed and sold as souvenirs to tourists.

From the entrance station we drove to the areas along the river where the tracks could still be seen in situ past a few deer who did not seem to mind us taking pictures. We clambered down to the riverbank and saw a couple of the tracks reasonably well. But I was dissuaded from checking out some other locations by the fact that the river was rather high and the water was completely over the "stepping stones" that I would have had to cross to see the other sites. Scientific curiosity warred with the fact that I had only brought 1 pair of shoes with and if those got wet I would spend the rest of the trip in cold, clammy footwear. For once, discretion proved to be the stronger motive and I didn't attempt the river crossing, Still, we got a pretty good look at two sites with several footprints on our side of the river, so we were satisfied. After a stop in the gift shop to purchase a cast of one of the old dinosaur prints, which we nicknamed "Fifi", we continued on our way south.

Shortly after we left the dinosaur park we entered the Texas hill country region. These hills were not very high in comparison with, say, the Appalachians back home, and much of the landscape was more of a series of rolling ridges than separate hills. Still, the slopes had scrub brush and trees growing here and there, so the landscape had some visual texture to it in contrast to the almost table flat land around Dallas. This made it easier on the eye for us, as we were accustomed to the eastern woodlands. Following Hank and Priscilla's excellent directions, we saw the "castle" as we dropped rather precipitously down over a ridge. In the distance we saw big lakes, and we wound around the last few jogs in the road and arrived at their house around 5 p.m.

They were there to welcome us, fortunately, and we were immediately shown around their sparkling new house and introduced to some of the 700 dolls in Priscilla's collection. The second and third floor balconies overlooked a small lake formed by damming the Colorado River, and they showed us pictures of some of the spectacular sunsets they had seen since moving in last year.

We chatted, went out for dinner at a good Mexican restaurant, came home, and chatted some more before we collapsed around 10 p.m. and had to turn in for the night.