Where in the World was zman? Part 4

It's been a hell of a twelve day run for your boy from the Neck. I will regale you with tales of my comings and goings over the next few days. My last installment left off at bedtime on Friday.

On Saturday we woke up bright and early, had breakfast, and went over to the WDC. We were loaded onto a van and hauled over some truly bumpy terrain to a dinosaur dig site where we spent about four hours helping the WDC staff dig stuff up.

The big black thing on the right of zson is a Camarasaurus leg bone, I think it was a femur. zson found a small piece of Camarasaurus tendon which they let him keep along with some fossilized plant matter and "float bone" (random tiny bone fragments) that I found. He was thrilled. Then they loaded us up again and took us even further out onto a ridge that used to be below an ocean. It's littered with fossilized sea life. We found and kept a bunch of clam and squid fossils, then went back to the museum for a behind-the-scenes tour including a Maiasaura mid-assembly and various pieces of Jimbo the Supersaurus. He's 106 feet long.

Then we got a guided museum tour. It was dope, as the kids say. Here's a Camarasaurus:

And here's the best Archaeopteryx in the US:

And here's an explanation of the Archaeopteryx:

Then we headed back to Casper. On Sunday we fished again with great success including this 20 inch rainbow trout.

Then we went back to Denver on Monday. zson was too pooped to do much other than swim in the hotel's saltwater pool and play with other kids at a McDonald's playground. I guess he needed some kid interaction after six days with just me. Then we flew home. I read "The Boilerplate Rhino" by David Quammen through most of the flight and it's perfect airplane material, especially after our week in the field. It's a collection of Quammen's essays from Outside magazine. They're all about 5-6 pages long so it's easy to stop and start the book, and the one about T. rex fossils in Montana was particularly resonant given recent events.

None of this is a humblebrag (except for that last photo of the fish). I have no idea how to parent properly. My guiding principle when I'm faced with a decision about my kids is to avoid doing what my parents would have done. So rather than have him watch TV all summer I took zson to a place I've never been to do stuff I wanted to do as a kid (and as an adult, truth be told). I'm just trying to get things right.

Hopefully zson will look back at this trip fondly. I know I will.

Where in the World was zman? Part 2

It's been a hell of a twelve day run for your boy from the Neck. I will regale you with tales of my comings and goings over the next few days. My last installment left off on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, zson and I flew to Denver and got a rental car. I knew we would have a good time when zson got in the car, a standard-size relatively popular five-passenger Japanese SUV, and said "Is this whole car made out of plastic?" I'm raising him right. I tuned the radio to Sirus's 70's channel as we started to drive north. About 10 minutes later zson said "We need to listen to country music" and he was correct. Just as walking around New York City with hiphop in your earphones can change the way you view a song and the city, country and western music sets the mood perfectly for the Rocky Mountain states. Four hours later we were in Casper, WY where we stayed in a cabin along the North Platte River.

Wyoming is strangely beautiful in late June. Driving north on I25, the prairie swells into mountains and the whole thing looks like a lumpy cake covered in sage green fondant. Every once in a while some force of nature cut the cake to reveal layers of coffee, chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet. It's stunning in a "Am I on Mars?" kind of way.

The next morning we woke up and went to the lodge about a quarter mile up the road where we got in a drift boat and fly fished our asses off with a guide from Crazy Rainbow. We caught rainbow trout exclusively, all of them in the 15 to 18 inch range. zson is pretty fishy—he always gets at least twice as many bites as I do and this day out was no different than normal. His cast isn’t great but he can mend and set really well. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your world view) the rainbows in the North Platte are so big and strong that they are more likely to pull zson into the water than he is to pull them into the boat. Ben, the guide, and I helped him finish off his fish. zson adopted the practice of kissing fish before releasing them.

We slept in the cabin that night and checked out downtown Casper the next morning (Friday). Casper is a funny little city. The population is only 55,000 but it has a college, an arena, a planetarium, several museums and lots of other stuff. Almost every man over 60 had a cowboy hat and boots, Wrangler jeans, and a big silver belt buckle commemorating some event involving cattle and/or horses. The vibe is old and hardscrabble mixed with right-wing patriotism. Here are some signs we saw in a diner.

If Casper was a singer it would be Merle Haggard.



That said, everyone we met was super friendly and interested to hear about life in New Jersey. Crazy Rainbow is affiliated with Ugly Bug Fly Shop, so we stopped by the shop and booked another half-day of fishing for the upcoming Sunday (I specifically didn't plan anything after Saturday because I wasn't sure what we would want to do, so we winged it from there). We also checked out Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitters, which is “One of the Nation's Leading Western Stores" according to their shopping bags, and a t-shirt store in which we bought University of Wyoming Cowboys gear: a shirt for zdaughter and socks for zwoman (cut us some slack, zson is eight).

Then we climbed aboard our plastic SUV and drove north for two hours, listening to Willie's Roadhouse, Outlaw Country, and Bluegrass Junction until we arrived in Thermopolis.

Stay tuned for further installments later this week.