The Dinosaur Trail

Tuesday May 14th we were up and ready to move on first thing in the morning, destination Winton to start our trail of the Dinosaurs. This trail starts at Winton’s, The age of the Dinosaur. We all decided it would be best to go straight to the exhibit before heading to camp. It was just Michelle, Emma, Jock and I doing this one the others were going to wait outside until we found out the tour takes 4hrs!!!! So the other two vans headed off and set up camp. When we saw the price of entry we were taken aback but in the end we all decided it was well worth it. We also had the opportunity to purchase a combined reduced priced ticket for the exhibits we would go to.

First stop was to the Labs this is where the Dinosaur bones are kept and where people work on cleaning them up for the exhibit. It really was interesting, we saw bones wrapped waiting to be cleaned, we got to watch the people working on them and even got to touch a huge thigh bone that is 95 million yrs old. We also saw a branch that had turned to stone, petrified wood.

Jock chatted to the tour guide and has decided we will return some time in the future and he will volunteer to clean up bones, we would stay on site in our van.

After the lab we went back to the main entrance to their auditorium and watched a presentation on the finding of the site and what has been found so far. Then we were talked through the display of Dinosaur bones.

Next exhibit was into Dinosaur Canyon but we had to wait for the start of our tour. So we sat out and had a drink, lovely you may think, nope, nightmare with all the flies about. We had to wear our head nets otherwise we would end up swallowing one, yeh, I swallowed one!!! YUK! For that reason I decided I would just drink my drink through the net, anything not to swallow another fly. We all came up with our own inventive ways to keep the flies out of our drinks or icecreams.

Our ride turned up by way of an elongated golf buggy. He drove us a fair way out along “The Jump Up” . They call it this because it rises sharply from the flat. We were shown some great exhibits, Dinosaurs were placed into scenes to show us how it may have looked all those years ago. We saw some Cycads that were 800 yrs old and the views from up there were just spectacular. The tour guide was very informative. We will have to come back in a few years time as they are adding to their exhibits with a new museum and an observatory. I look forward to it.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit but we were SO glad to leave the flies behind. Well those that didn’t hitch a lift in our car!!