Fossil Rim

We took a mini family vacation in honor of Amelia's spring break this week. Given that Amelia and my spring break vacations did not overlap (what was SMU's calendar committee thinking when they scheduled that incorrectly?!?), it was hard to plan a more elaborate family vacation for this break. But what we decided to do, I think, was pretty much perfect for our family at this time.

We started off on Thursday afternoon when we left Dallas and drove approximately 80 miles west to a small town called Granbury (photo below is the children on the boardwalk next to Lake Granbury. Yes, dalmation had to come along for the trip.). We enjoyed our overnight stay in Granbury, where highlights of our stay were our dinner in the Granbury town square and then swimming the next morning in the hotel pool. By late morning we had checked out of the hotel and we drove 15 miles to the town of Glen Rose, where our desitination was the Fossil Rim Animal Park. The animal park was so much fun! Fossil Rim is an open-air zoo, similar to an African safari, where you drive your car along a paved path and observe the free-roaming animals in the park. Each car has one bag of animal feed to throw out the windows to the animals, who are tame and have enough experience to know that the patrons in the cars have food for them. Thus the animals get pretty close to the cars, and you have great opportunities to see them up close and in a natural setting. We saw so many animals, including deer, buffalo, ostrich, antelopes, zebras, giraffes, emus, rhinos, and gazelles. Amelia and John enjoyed throwing the food out the windows at the animals, and Scott skillfuly drove us through the park (and did not kill any animals in the process!). Halfway through the nine-mile drive we stopped at the observation point where there was a petting zoo (no cages here, the animals were free-roaming) and a special area for chilren which Amelia and John enjoyed. After the stop we finished our drive out of the park and arrived back in Dallas by dinnertime on Friday.

Amelia and John absolutely loved this mini-vacation! Scott and I had fun too - the weather was completely delightful, and we both thought that the animal park was a great destination and that the free-roaming animals were quite lovely to view and enjoy - though we got frustrated by the kiddos when they were reluctant to go to bed in the hotel Thursday evening (our first attempt to sleep as a family of four in a two queen bed standard hotel room was not such a good experience, courtesy of John's inability to sit still in a bed!). But overall, the children were enamored by the small details of the vacation - eating breakfast at the hotel's buffet restaurant, swimming in the hotel pool, feeding animals on the drive, petting them at the nature center, etc. - which reinforced my belief that entertainment for the kiddos doesn't have to be big or fancy for them to get a great deal of enjoyment out of the experience. In fact, today when I suggested that maybe we would visit the animal park again in a few years to see the animals again, Amelia protested and said that she wanted to go back again soon, that she couldn't wait until she was 7 or 8 to see the animals again. You know, a good number of our neighbors and friends enjoy lavish vacations during spring break, where they go skiing or on fancy cruises, to the Mexican riviera, etc.. And while that is all fun and completely delightful (sounds nice to me!), it just goes to show you that a $300 trip two hours west of Dallas can be a whole lot of fun for the children, even if it is not that extravagant.




At left, a zebra outside of our car. This is how close the animals got to us! Cool! Below, Amelia with a friend in the children's petting zoo area.