Mimi's Summer Day Camp, Day TEN --- Dinosaurs!

Thursdays are usually field trip day, so today we took off to see dinosaurs! 

Our destination was the Bandera Natural History Museum, a brand new museum that has only been open a few weeks.  It was easy to find, it's on Old San Antonio Road which goes right by Bandera High School.  

The inside of the museum has a gift shop, a small area for educational demonstrations and talks, a small snack area, and then the first big hall with artifacts, masks, and animals donated by a Bandera rancher.  The triceratops skeleton was the replica used in one of the Night at the Museum movies!

After the big hall, we entered an area with dioramas depicting animals from various habitats around the world.  There was a desert area, a swamp, arctic, and more.  We walked around these areas twice -- the girls really enjoyed looking at all of these animals.

On the side of the building, they have set up several sand pits where the kids can dig for dinosaur bones!  KT enjoyed this a lot more then Joss, she was done with it when she got sand in her shoes. Ha! So she and I ended up sitting at a picnic table while KT dug. The bones ended up being replicas that you can fit back into the dinosaur that sits at the back of the sand pit.  Interesting!

 Next was the best part yet! The grounds of the museum are filled with HUGE dinosaurs.  These replicas were truly amazing, and it's so great that they let people touch and move around these bodies! There are plaques with the names of each of the dinosaurs.  There are plans for future gardens around these, I believe they are planning natural Texas plants around them in the future.

The girls LOVED these - they ran from one to the other examining them and touching them and sitting on them! So cool. This was worth every penny of the admission price.  

After the museum we picked up lunch at the local Dairy Queen and headed home.  
There wasn't time for much else today but our usual swim and Popsicle.  So nice on a really hot day.

I'm not sure what we're doing at camp next week, trying to find activities that Mimi can do on her own with the girls since Grumpy is "out of commission" right now.  He had surgery on Wednesday and is recovering.  It's coming along nicely, so after a couple of weeks we think he can join us at camp again.
See you next week!