Dinosaurs in the Woods

Imagine the following:

You're riding on a huge, multi-section trailer attached to a jeep, cruising through the woods. For some reason, there's an assault rifle under your seat. Suddenly, the man driving the jeep announces over a loudspeaker that there's a tyrannosaur to your left. You whip out the assault rifle, hoping to get in a lucky shot...

Alternately, imagine you're walking on a trail through the woods. You can see strange, foreign forms through the trees, and never close enough to see are animal noises that range from violent and raucous to merely vaguely unsettling. Suddenly, you come upon creatures from a foreign time and place...

This is Prehistoric Forest. (Website for the one I'm talking about here. There's another one in Michigan, apparently, that's been closed for years...)

Prehistoric Forest is an old theme park that has an obvious theme-dinosaurs.

Yes, those are supposed to be dinosaurs-Psittacosaurus, to be precise. They come from much earlier in the park's rather long and somewhat chaotic history. Other statues in the park range from outlandish...

...to fairly realistic...

...to artistic license and beauty.

Speaking of art, the full image doesn't do this photograph justice-you need to look at it up close. Be cautious of opening it up in a new tab/window if you've got a slow connection, because my sister's new camera takes HUGE pictures, but despite a bit of graininess, it's a beautiful moment. (You might, if you like these pictures, watch sis's blog over the next two to three days, as there's a reasonable chance she might post more of her pics over there. And, oyah, some pictures of that little Star Wars thing she went to recently are also likely.)

The park also has a couple of other dinosaurs:

That's right-vintage arcade machines. And you thought they were extinct.

You might be wondering just why I'm going on about Prehistoric Forest.

Well, it's pretty much the closest theme park to my home, and it's also the only area theme park I've ever actually liked. I have fond memories of it from childhood and adulthood alike. (So does my mother, who tends to talk a little more about its partner park, Mystery Hill, which is a sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying optical illusion park that can give people vertigo or make you trip if you're not careful.)

The park has had something of a turbulent history, though, even (especially) in my lifetime, going from a style somewhat similar to the Jurassic Park-like format described above (which predated the novel, by the way) to a simpler, less hectic nature walk. Part of the change was brought about when some drunk carousers destroyed several of the more delicate statues. (There's a T-Rex statue/animatronic unit that has a portion of a tire for its nose. It works surprisingly well if you don't look too close, and the statue's actually quite charming... although there's a trailer park visible behind it through the trees.) There was also a period where there was a reptile house, though apparently those became too expensive to keep and the building became a workshop for building the dinosaurs.

And that history may be coming to an end now, because the current owners are retiring, and have stated they have no plans to sell. (Not that I blame them; it seems to be a bit of a rough place to run, for reasons mentioned above.)

The last day for Prehistoric Forest will be September 12 this year. After that, it's anyone's guess as to if and when the park might reopen. My mother's brother will be visiting that weekend, and he'll probably stop by on the last day for nostalgic reasons... Then, there will be one fewer dinosaur theme park in the world.

And none of them will be where I can visit without having to drive for more than ten hours.

-Signing off.