It’s been interesting these last few years that we have had kids in school, to see the kinds of field trips they have gone on. I have seen them go on field trips to the zoo, or Ethan once went to Thanksgiving point, they also sometimes have a “walking field trip” to a nearby park. A while ago Jeremy had a field trip to the “CAL Ranch Store”. Tyra has a field trip coming up to go to a planetarium at BYU, and Ethan will be going to Utah lake, and to a natural history museum before this school year is over. Thinking of all these places made Kyle and I reminisce to when we were in elementary school and what kinds of field trips we went on. We both remember field trips that included some tide pools, and we both remember going to the “La Brea Tar Pits”. We went and found some tide pools last time we were in California, so this time we made time for the tar pits!
We started our visit waiting for the tour to start while the kids tried to lift the metal poles out of some tar:
The tour began, and we went to follow the guide.
I thought he seemed like a guy who REALLY likes what he does, and he seemed to know a lot about the different fossils in the museum. However we soon noticed that most of the kids were getting bored, and the guide just wasn’t moving fast enough to keep their interest, so we had to go on ahead and do our own self guided tour. In this picture I love the look of surprise on Jeremy’s face!
Tyra wanted to size her arm span up with the mammoth’s tusks:
That meant that Dinah wanted to size her arm span up with the large bird’s wing span:
Some of the kids were really interested in watching a real paleontologist working on real fossils in the “Fishbowl lab”.
Jeremy being silly yet again:
After we finished looking at everything inside the museum we decided to go out and explore the atrium. It was very pretty with all the plants and the small water fall. I think the kids got a kick out of seeing a whole bunch of turtles.
When we first walking into the museum, and Kyle was buying tickets, the kids got really excited to find souvenir penny smasher machines. You may remember that when we were in North Carolina they were introduced to this concept, and I had since found penny passports for them to keep their smashed pennies in, and penny smashing machines here at the tar pits meant they got to add a second penny to their collection. So when we were finished checking out the atrium and we were about ready to go, we lined all the kids up on the bench while I tried to figure out how many quarters and how many pennies I had. 😉
I am really glad we were able to make time to visit the La Brea Tar Pits. I think most of the kids really enjoyed it too, of course Lydia and Adam don’t really care very much, but they were pleasant sitting in the stroller and just checking things out.