Dinosaur Valley State Park

This past weekend, we decided to take the kids to Dinosaur Valley State Park. It was a blast! Some of our good friends went with us - the Williams Family and the Lund Family.

We left Friday morning and drove down {it's about 2 hours away}. Then, we set up camp and let the kids run wild.


That night we had dutch oven chicken {thanks for the recipe mom}, apple cobbler, and s'mores. Mmm, mmm good!

Around 1:00 am, as I was peacefully sleeping, my dear hubby woke me up because there was a noise coming from our camp. He got out his flashlight and shined it onto the camp. There were raccoons messing with our garbage.
This is the discussion that we had:

Elliott: "Who put that garbage so close to the ground? They're ripping it apart."
Camille: "Are they going to keep doing it?"
Elliott: "Yep"
Camille: "Should we do something about it?"
Elliott: "Sure."
Camille: "Are you going to do anything about it?"
Elliott: no response
Camille: "Is there going to be garbage all over in the morning?"
Elliott: "Probably"
Camille: waiting to see if he will offer to move it
Elliott: falling back asleep
Camille: "Fine, I will go move the garbage. Give me the flashlight!"

I went and put the garbage in the dumpster. I didn't have my glasses, so I was pretty much blind as a bat and hoping that a raccoon didn't bite me. I've heard those rabies shots are BAD!

After I took care of the garbage, I got back into my warm sleeping bag and fell asleep. Then, around 5:00 am, Elliott woke up again -- he was freezing. His thin summer sleeping bag just wasn't as warm as my nice army bag. So... I got Brooke out of her playpen and gave her sleeping bag and blanket to Elliott. Then, I put her in bed with me. During that process, Aubrey woke up. So, I put Aubrey in between Elliott and I, took the mat off the playpen and set it on the ground, put William on the play pen mat, and took the blanket that was under the kids and put it on top of all of us. {Whew} Brooke took a while to go back to sleep, but she eventually did and we got a few more hours of rest.

The next morning was rather cold, so it took us a while to get up and get moving.

Once we did, we had breakfast and then did a little Easter egg hunt for the kids. After that we had lunch and then went site seeing.

We saw the giant dinosaur statues and then we went down to the river.

It was a beautiful day and the kids had fun playing in the water. At first they didn't have their swimsuits on, but that didn't stop them. At one point William lost his shoe, and the current was carrying it downstream. I was chasing after it as fast as I could over the slippery rocks. Luckily some boys downstream waded out and got if for me.

Soon it was time to go take down camp - the next people had already set up their tent. While we were cleaning up the kids changed into their swimsuits and then once it was all loaded we went back to the river.

We ended our wonderful trip by playing in the water until it was time to leave.


We had a fun time, and we're glad that we had some great friends to share it with! Next time we need to stay longer.