Sauriermuseum, Aathal

We all kind of needed to get out of the house after yesterday, but it still looked pretty gray and cold outside. I suppose that we've been spoiled by this gorgeous early summer that we've been enjoying: a few months ago, in Seattle, this sort of weather would never give me pause.  All the same, I thought it might be a good day for an indoor museum, and, we settled on something special for Joey.

Sauriermuseum: Zürich's own dinosaur museum!  Joey didn't let me down: when I told him where we were going, his face lit up, and he responded with a heartfelt "Dinosaurs! RAWR!"

The museum is about 45 minutes away, and when we stepped off the train, Dennis noted, wryly, that I seem to purposely search out the most ridiculously isolated locations for these weekend trips.  It was a funny little corner of the outskirts: the train station was a lonely one, with one track in either direction, and it was flanked bye run-down houses, a dilapidated water wheel, and a used-car dealer.  But there was also a steady trickle of families returning to the station from up the street, from the direction where the big, happy dinosaur was pointing.  So I wasn't the only maniacal mommy who dragged her family out on this drizzly day.

No, not by a long shot.  It turned out that today was some sort of national museum day, and, for it, the museum had prepared a scavenger hunt that spanned the museum, with a fossil prize at the end.  The museum collection is in an old textile factory, which as been divided into an improbable number of rooms, with the dinosaur skeletons ducking and curling up to fit inti their cramped quarters.  And the pathways were stuffed with determined children, clutching their papers.

Well, you know we Geelses aren't ones to turn our noses up at a scavenger hunt, never mind that it's in German.  So, after we wandered around the first couple of rooms and got our bearings,

And, to Ella's delight, saw a giant, prehistoric sea turtle
skeleton...does it get any cooler than that?

Dennis, Ella, and Alex hunkered down to earn themselves some fossils.

But I really didn't get to watch them work their way through the puzzles: at this point, Joey was kind of sort of beside himself, running this way and that, exclaiming over and over, "Look! Dinosaurs!"  I've never had a dinosaur kid before, and I'm not sure what caused his fascination, but it's pretty adorable.

So I let young Joey lead me through the museum, which mostly contained models and facsimiles,

but they did have a several honest-to-goodness fossilized skeletons, discovered by crews sponsored by the museum foundation over the course of several digs in Howe Ranch, Wyoming.

They also had a large section in the basement devoted to dinosaurs in the cinema, and Joey, exhausted from his joy, settled down to watch the video that was playing on loop.  The film was in German, so my understanding of it was shaky, but it seemed to be made in the style of Crocodile Hunter, only, through the magic of CGI, the intrepid scientist wasn't teasing crocodiles with long sticks.  Nope...he was tracking, and feeding, and touching, and taunting dinosaurs.

Rapt! Joey, incidentally, chose his own clothes this morning,
including his sister's socks.

So now poor Joey is under the impression that there are real, honest-to-goodness dinosaurs out there to be played with, if only his parents weren't such spoil-sports.

I did the next best thing, though: I took him to the outdoor playground, where he could pretend to dig for dinosaur bones,in the shade of a bloody-mawed Tyrannosaurus rex.

As a part of their special event, the museum had rocks for sale, fresh from their Howe Ranch dig site, that you could chip away at in hopes of finding fossilized fish bones.  And so the playground was covered with clusters of children, each cheering on their dads as they manfully chiseled those rocks.

Our own dear dad showed up with two very happy kids. They ran into trouble with just one of questions on their list, but, when Ella finally gathered enough courage to ask for help, the museum guide was happy to overlook that question. She gave each of the kids a fossilized shell and a shark tooth for their trouble.

Triumph!

Of course Ella was pretty excited about all of the rock breaking going on around her, but Dennis was spared from joining all the other sweaty, dusty fathers: she was content to collect cast-off shards and shape them with other, harder rocks.  She made me a caveman valentine out of one of them, lucky mom that I am.

Inside a casting of a Brontosaurus footprint

Alex spent an extra long time playing in the block pit.

Eventually that rain that had been threatening us all day arrived and chased us off the playground and back on the train to home, where we all curled up with our dinner and a movie...and, yes, went back to straining our eyes, staring at vacation-planning websites.  And I'm afraid we're not much further than we were yesterday.

But hey! We got to play with dinosaurs today! RAWR!