Nest of Dinosaur Babies

From the outside, the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum doesn’t look like much, in fact, it looks like a barn for long-haul trucks, but don’t let that fool you, inside are many many beautiful and amazing fossils.

Many of the fossils are arranged in life-like poses like this nest of dinosaur babies. The collection is probably most notable for the huge Supersaurus that stretches the length of the big hall, but I didn’t think my iPhone camera would do it justice. If you click their link, you can see what it looks like. The collection also contains the only Archaeopteryx in North America, as well as a 35-foot T-Rex and several Triceratops (which happens to be the Wyoming state dinosaur). There are more than 30 skeletons of the Allosaurus, a fossil fish from Scotland, as well as flying reptiles from Brazil, dinosaurs from China and marine reptiles from several continents.

While the big dinosaurs were truly impressive, what I liked best were the little ones like these two, posed as they might have been in life. For one thing, these aren’t casts, these are real fossilized bones. The Supersaurus is a cast, mostly because it’s so big that it would be impossible to support the weight of all those fossilized bones. What we both really liked was that in the cases below the Supersaurus were some of the actual fossilized bones, with great signage pointing out the lines that signaled growth plates.

The collection is really impressive. As much as I loved the fossils that appeared to be like live beings, I think my favorites were the many beautiful graphic fossils like this one:

Safari Club, Day's Inn, Thermopolis

While the hot springs were fabulous, as was the Dinosaur Museum (which will get a post of its own), finding real food, and a decent drink, posed a challenge and was the big downside to my Fabulous Birthday Adventure.

The Safari Club at the Day’s Inn is pretty much the only place in town, and while the display of taxidermy is, depending on your view of such things, stupendous and/or horrifying, the food and drink possibilities are problematic. We started out at the Safari Club for a drink before trying to figure out where to go for dinner, and it didn’t seem a good sign when the bartender insisted in trying to sell me girly drinks made with “cake-flavored” vodka.

What?! Really? Ick!

I had a beer, as did Himself, and we looked at the bar menu, which was straight off the Sysco truck. Fried things. Burgers. Wings. There is a restaurant at the Day’s Inn, where they were serving more pre-prepped food including a Saturday night special involving a steak and some breaded shrimp. There was a Prime Rib special. There was a salmon. And all of it screamed pre-prepped and shipped frozen.  It reminded me of my childhood in the Midwest,  when the local hotel often had the only “going out” food in town.

After our beers we walked into town in search of a local restaurant, someplace were actual people were cooking actual food from ingredients, not heating up prepared stuff off a truck. There was an empty Mexican restaurant with a terrifying sidewalk display of inflatable Christmas decorations. And there was another restaurant that looked promising from the outside that claimed it had steaks and such. When we walked in, the place was decorated with angels and those little decorative signs bearing exhortations of faith. The music was … well … “inspirational.” By the time I came back from using the ladies room, Himself was looking crestfallen, and so it was up to me to ask the nice older lady waiting on us to confirm that no, she was sorry, they didn’t have a liquor license.

And so, it was back to the Day’s Inn, where we had another drink, and settled on the burgers. The people at the bar were exceedingly nice, but the food, the food it was not so good. Burgers one was glad were overcooked because who knows how many cows had gone into their pre-packaged contents, and those weird battered fries that Sysco sells. But there was a glass of wine, and a nice sulfury hot tub awaiting us, so despite our disappointment that there wasn’t anyplace in that small town where you could get a meal cooked by actual people and a drink, we made do. (Next time, taking a cooler with us…).

But the real kicker was breakfast. Now, Himself hasn’t had to travel for work so he was unfamiliar with the standard free breakfast that most hotels now offer. Ours didn’t have a real kitchen, so we were greeted in the morning by a chafing dish filled with pre-scrambled eggs that had been heated up in the microwave (yum, rubbery), soggy sausage patties (also microwaved) and the make-your-own-waffle whose batter seems to be comprised entirely of sugar. There was also a case filled with sugary muffins, poofy-yet-stale bagels, and a dispiriting array of individually-wrapped slices of white bread. There was some fruit — apples and oranges, and some yogurt (the sweet kind). Cereal, again, sugary … and there was coffee. Not great coffee, but at least freshly-brewed coffee. It all looked like food, and yet, none of it really was, well, food.

Now, I was not as shocked or dismayed by all of this as Himself was, but then again, not only did I live in “normal” suburban California for quite a while, but I’ve also travelled for work. Himself, he was appalled. He kept asking why you couldn’t get a decent burger in Wyoming, of all places — after all, we’d passed plenty of steers on our way down there. They grow a lot of potatoes in Wyoming and Montana too — as for the breakfast, he coudn’t understand why even if they didn’t have a real kitchen, they didn’t just have someone making real eggs? You can do that in an electric skillet. What really upset him was that no one else was upset, that everyone seemed to think the food situation was perfectly fine. That people were happily eating what Michael Pollan has so aptly named “food-like” products.

And so, the downside of Thermopolis — food, or the lack therof. Next trip, we’re taking a cooler with some real food — perhaps a couple of hard boiled eggs, some sandwich supplies, or my mother’s old standby for picnics — a nice cold roasted chicken. Some fruit. Decent bread. And our own stash of coffee to put in the in-room coffeemaker. Also, a second cooler with some beer for him and a decent bottle of wine for me. We’ll travel like my great-grandparents did, with our own supplies (although I don’t think I’ll need to pack all my own sheets and bedding like they did on their cross-country auto trip in the early 1920s).

World's Largest Hot Mineral Springs

For my birthday last weekend, my sweetie whisked me off to Thermopolis, Wyoming for a little adventure.

As you can see from the hillside sign, Thermopolis bills itself as the world’s largest hot mineral springs, and while it’s smaller in acreage than the Mammoth terraces in Yellowstone, apparently about a million-and-a-half gallons of hot water gush out of the springs every day. The springs themselves, as well as two hotels,  two commercial pools with slides and saunas and other entertainments, and a State Bath House with both an outdoor and indoor pool, are all part of a really lovely state park. There are numerous picnic areas, and a bandshell, and they’d put up just the right amount of holiday lights — enough to be pretty, but not so many that they overwhelmed the place. The whole vibe was just good in the way that well-run public amenities often are. Everything was beautifully kept up, and even in December there were people using the whole place — not just the pools, but we saw a cute family having their Christmas pictures taken, and various dog walkers, and even some fishermen (who were taking themselves far too seriously). Oh, and there’s a lovely retirement home there as well, which seems sort of ideal.

Hotel, Former Sanitarium

We stayed at the Best Western, which is a converted Sanitarium built around a central courtyard where the pool and mineral hot tub are located. It’s a fairly recent conversion and they did a great job. We had a corner room which was enormous, with nice furniture and good views and it was down a little corridor from the outdoor balcony/hallways surrounding the pool area, so it was nice and quiet. The hot pool was wonderful, and when we asked they turned it up a little bit (by increasing the amount of springs water  coming into the pool). We were joined by two other couples from Sheridan, and then a dad with his little girl, and the conversations were wide-ranging, lively, and best of all, friendly. When two die-hard lefties like us can spend a fun evening trading stories about wolf management and wolves-we-have-seen, and discover connections (on my part) among the horse people, and just generally shoot the shit, well, it gives you hope that despite all the yelling on television, actual Americans can still manage to have conversations with one another.

Tepee Fountain

It’s a fair drive from Livingston, so we got there with about an hour of daylight left with which to explore the park. The first “sight” was this big ball-o-mineralization. There’s a tiny burbling fountain on the top and when you get closer, you discover from the useful sign, that under all that mineral accumulation is a stone teepee! 

We went for a nice walk around the park, which was refreshingly devoid of fences and warning signs. They seemed to somehow feel that people were probably going to be bright enough not to burn or drown themselves. We walked up the hill to the source spring, and along the mineral terraces, and out across the swinging bridge (which I didn’t get a photo of, it spans the Big Horn River, which runs alongside the park).

Mineral Terraces

While we were on the bluff overlooking the river and the terraces, a huge flock, thousands of little black birds, starlings perhaps, came swooping up the canyon below us, nearly engulfing us, while below ducks and geese fished the river in those places where the hot springs met the colder river water.

As we turned to head back to the hotel, and begin our quest for dinner (more on that tomorrow) the sun was setting through the steam. We lucked out on weather — two blue sky days in December, and even with the buildings on site, you really got a sense of what the springs must have looked like to the Indians who used them for centuries, and for the first white settlers who stumbled upon them.

Tomorrow: The Food Desert that is Thermopolis