My Utah Trip: Family Week: Day 2, Thanksgiving Point: The Dinosaur Museum and Cabela's

About a month before we took our trip, I had taken the kids to playgroup. On this particular day, playgroup was at a park, that had a nice little wooded area with walking trail, near the playground. When it was about time to go, I coaxed Cinderella onto the stroller. Actually I think I probably picked her up, kicking and screaming and strapped her down. Anyway, I decided we would take a little walk through the wooded area, before we went and got in the car. Cinderella was mad. She was screaming. Anyway once we got in the trees, she asked me if this was a forest. I told her it was. Forests don't have to be big right? Anyway, then she asked me if we would see a deer. I told her I didn't know. But deer only come out when it is quiet. They don't come out when we are screaming and yelling, so she hushed. Well I didn't think we would see a deer, but you never know. Well we didn't, and Cinderella was understandably upset. Well I knew that we were planning to go up into the mountains and go to a lake, at least one of the days that we were visiting in Utah. So I told her that maybe we would see one when we were at Grandma's house. She took that for a promise that she would see one when we visited Grandma. After she mentioned a few times that she was going to get to see a deer when we went to Grandma's house, I figured I had better see what I could do to make sure she saw one, if at all possible.
So I called my mom. I told her about the situation, and she said, "well we are going to go to the zoo so we should see one there." Well Hogle Zoo doesn't have any deer. Unless there are some you can see if you ride the train, which we didn't do. So then my mom had the idea of Cabela's. Now for those of you who like me before I went to Utah on this trip, have never heard of Cabela's, it is an outdoor sports store. But it is more than a store. Inside the store they have a small aquarium, they have a big "mountain" with taxidermy animals perched all over it, and they even have a small animal museum filled with taxidermy deer. Well it was our one guarantee that she would see a deer. Albeit a dead deer, but it is a deer.


Anyway, we had told Cinderella that one of the things we were going to do that day was go to the Dinosaur Museum, which was what she was really looking forward to. She asked me if she was going to see dinosaurs. I told her all the dinosaurs had died a long time ago, and all we would see was their bones. She was quite concerned that all the dinosaurs were dead, but accepted my saying so. My brother S had a date that night and had to cut out late, so when we finished with the gardens, we ate a picnic lunch and headed over to Cabela's so he could join us there. On our way over to Cabela's, Cinderella asked me if she was going to see deer. I told her yes. She then asked if all the deer were dead. I didn't know how to answer that question, because all the deer we were going to see were dead, but not all deer are dead. I tried to not laugh and tried to explain it to her. I think she understood.
After the gardens that morning, most people were all pictured out, so unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the animals at Cabela's except this one.




Thankfully the deer at Cabela's satisfied Cinderella's interest in seeing deer.

After we left Cabela's we were all worn out. Except for Cinderella who still really wanted to see dinosaur bones. So we went over to the museum, and toured it as quickly as we could.

The kids playing on a dinosaur.

Isn't that a big shark? They are guessing due to the size of fossilized shark teeth, that this is about the size they used to be.