9. Take Sophie to Dinotown/water slides out in the valley.

Here's a photo essay of our trip to Dinotown, "North America's Only Cartoon Dinosaur Town", due to close this September after 35 years in business. (They were formerly known as Flintstones Park.)

Sophie wore her dinosaur PJ top and her best dinosaur face.


Here we are posed in front of an old-school Flintstones-style boulder-lifting dinosaur, like Fred uses at his job. His tail is a slide that Sophie didn't want to go down because it was too dirty.


Here, we're wandering through the "realistic dinosaur" section. Not sure how these guys snuck into a cartoon dinosaur town, but they were pretty neat. Holly has a pretty good dinosaur face, but it doesn't quite match Sophie's.


Sophie's legs weren't long enough to activate the stone age breaks, so I had to stop us when we got going too fast.


Here's Sophie riding one of the pteradactyls. They all had names like Ptracy and Pthomas. Har har. After this one crash landed, Sophie learned the valuable lesson of not covering your pilot's eyes during flight.


Here are Holly and Sophie driving what might be a dinosaur school bus.


We learned about lines, and not getting to go first, when we waited to take a ride on the train. Very exciting stuff! (The train ride, not the waiting in line.)


We got a kick out of this. Our three-year-old Sophie was tall enough to go on the boat ride alone. Common sense prevailed, and we decided to go with her.


Soph loved it. She got her own oar and did a great job paddling around the little circuit of water.


After that, we tried out the pedal cars. Those things can really move! Two laps around, then on to something else...


... which turned out to be another crack at the boats. Sophie really loved it, we've got to take her kayaking at some point soon.


Hard to imagine that North America's Cartoon Dinosaur Towns will soon be extinct!


Here's Sophie, playing around on the main stage, where they perform most of their shows, including the Hannah Montana Tribute Show and the Justin Bieber Tribute Show. Hmm, maybe it's not so hard to imagine that they're going extinct, after all...


Sophie and I beside the big yellow dinosaur, who appeared to be helpfully getting a hula hoop down from a tree.


And here's the whole family posing with the... possible Triceratops? Torosaurus? Strangely enough, there wasn't any educational interpretation about the current events surrounding the dinosaur world. As you can see, the ... juvenile Torosaurus doesn't look too pleased about this lack of serious reporting in the Cartoon Dinosaur Town. Goodbye, Dinotown!


Now, I know the 101 item was to take Sophie to Dinotown slash water slides, but I'm calling this one done, even though it squeaked by on a technicality. We actually did go to the water slides, just not in, or down. It was a long day, and Sophie was in full-on cranky mode. "Dadda... I think I didn't really want to go to Dinotown," and (on the way home), "So what are we going to do today?" Sigh...