Dinotown!

We traveled out to Bridal Falls today to visit Dinotown. I hadn't been there in... oh... twenty years or so but thought the kids might get a kick out of it.

Because of how long it has been, I'm not sure if my memory of it (seeing as I was probably under 10 years old) is distorted from a child's perspective (I remember it being AWESOME), or if the park has, well... been really "mis-managed" is the most diplomatic way of saying it, I suppose...

"Gone down the toilet" - was more what I was thinking.

I believe my children had fun in the TWO hours it took us to do EVERYTHING interesting there was to do at the park, (not hardly worth the admission) but I was sufficiently "underwhelmed" by the whole thing.

Let me give you a run down so you can decide if you would actually want to spend your money there:

First, I remember bumper cars very fondly...


Averie's face pretty much says it all... there were only THREE cars in working order... not a whole lot of "bumping" going on. No staff on hand - you just got in one & left when you got tired of it (for my kids that was about 3 minutes). Pretty disappointing...

Then there was the pedal cars... when I was a child, they were great! Flintstone themed - like a cartoon you could sit in :) Something like this...


Two people could sit side-by-side in them (each had a set of pedals) & you went around a track... loads of fun!
The pedal cars today???

...uh... yaaaaa.... that's basically a 4 wheeled bicycle that I drove with Evan on my knee (while pedaling)... and has a HAND brake... lame, to say the least.

There's a train ride which is pretty much how I remembered it & Evan LOVED...


A little playground with a dinosaur slide...

the rest of the playground is sun-faded Little Tikes play structures... small ones.

A show with Dinotown characters...

My little "monsters" hammed it up on stage before the show started :)

The show itself, left much to be desired. It ALMOST kept my kids' attention, but I think one of the characters was covering for the usual guy & had NO idea what he was doing. Half the time he was being led around by the arm by one of the other characters!!

And, the dinosaur statues are pretty much the same as I remembered:


There is a waterpark, which for us was less than fun, since even though there were large signs stating "ADULT SUPERVISION IS MANDATORY" - of course, the worse behaved children had no one supervising them & I literally had to pull my children out of there for their safety (Pushing & shoving on wet pavement has repercussions I wasn't willing to accept).

There's also paddle boats which were fairly fun (no picture since paddling & holding my 4 month old was as coordinated as it gets for me! lol)

For the most part, the staff were either rude, or looked like they were so bored, they bordered on catatonic.

All in all... if we hadn't taken advantage of a reduced admission rate, I would have been VERY upset. Feel free to experience it yourself, but we won't be going back.

We spent time together as a family which is always enjoyable, but would have had the same amount of fun (or more!) at a free neighborhood playground.

It actually made me quite sad since it is a childhood memory that I wanted to share with my children & poor/CHEAP management has really ruined it. It has not been adequately maintained & you just get this feeling of overall "junkiness" because of it.

Too bad... it is NOT what it once was.