Dinosaur Tracking

Last Monday Maura and I celebrated the remaining time we had together during the summer with a road trip. We headed west to Connecticut, leaving just late enough in the morning for traffic around Boston to clear. Our mission was to track a dinosaur. We knew we wouldn’t find the beast itself. It had been gone for 100 million years. It walked the sandy shores of a Connecticut lake in the early Jurassic and left its tracks set in stone to be seen by humans eons later.

Maura and I did not see the trackway preserved at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill Connecticut, under a dome erected over the spot where it was found to protect the tracks from the weather. The exhibit was closed, as it is every Monday, a fact I had failed to note when I had visited the park’s web site the night before.

Maura was disappointed but we made the best of our trip. The park itself is open every day and we stopped for a while. We ate a picnic lunch while wishing we had brought bug spray to keep off the mosquitoes. After lunch we took a nature hike. We walked through a red maple swamp and up a traprock ridge. On our way back we spotted dragon flies and watched them for a time. When we returned to our car we saw a taste of what we had come to see. Next to the parking lot was a slap of rock with several clear dinosaur footprints in it.

We took the long way home across Connecticut. We expected we would find something interesting to see along the way. We passed a historic home or two and at least one museum, but all seemed to be closed on Mondays. We still managed to enjoy the day. It was nice to spend time together away from the TV and the computer. We walked and talked together and I taught Maura a bit about geology, one of my favorite subjects. We also beat the heat. During the only real heat wave we’ve had this summer in New England we spent the day in the air-conditioned car not the very warm house.