Taos, New Mexico

June 25, 2009

Today, I went white water rafting.  It was OK.  At the end, it rained! And it stung a lot!  But, the river was sort of mellow.

June 26, 2009

Today, I went to a ski place, Taos Ski Valley.  It was really scary looking down from the top from our chair lift.

June 27, 2009

Today, I went to a rodeo!!!!  It was really fun!!!!  There was a kid thing where you catch a calf, and I won!  I had to pull a ribbon off a bull (calf), and the winners got a dollar.  Later, I got a dinosaur egg with that dollar. 

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Today I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Georgia O’Keeffe was a good artist.  She drew both abstract and realistic paintings.  She liked to draw flowers like the Jimson Weed.  She inspired many people to become artists.  My favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting was Mount Fuji.

A Visit To Colorado Springs

In Colorado Springs, CO, we stayed in a cabin in the Garden of the Gods Campground.  Garden of the Gods Park is a beautiful place with huge red rocks that were formed over millions of years by the earth’s tectonic plates colliding.

I went to Pike’s Peak, a mountain that settlers went to in search of gold in Colorado.  I did not like it there at all, at 14,000 feet.  My ears were all plugged up.  It was really cold at the very tippy top.    I threw snow balls at Kayla!

We went to the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.  It was a really, really big huge big huge big huge petrified forest.  There were really huge redwood tree-mungous tree fossils.

Next door, there is a fossil quarry where I collected leaf and bug fossils.  This was fun, and interesting, because you never know what you’re going to get when you crack open a piece of shale.

On another day, I went to a talk about buffaloes.  Well, it was very sad.  Do you know that people used to go on trains, and they would shoot buffalo through the windows for target practice, and they wouldn’t even collect any meat from them?  And, when they did go to collect something from the buffalo, it was just the tongue for fancy restaurants?  I think it’s horrible what people did to buffalo.  At least now, buffaloes are being preserved.

I also went to a gold mine.  The gold vein was a 1,000 feet deep in the ground.  In the mine, I didn’t find gold but I found tons of copper, oxygenated copper.  Did you know that the Statue of Liberty is made of oxygenated copper?  The mining trip was awesome, and at the end I got my own piece of gold ore.

Colorado Springs was a very cool place to visit because there was lots of fun stuff to do!

Discovery Of A Lifetime At The Sternberg Museum

I went to the Sternberg Museum in Hayes, Kansas.  I saw the fish-within- a-fish.  It’s really a fish, within a fish, within a fish.  The fish-within-a-fish was really big.  The biggest fish had big, sharp teeth and a top and bottom rib cage.

I like fossils so I thought it was really cool.  They had a mini movie theater where they showed how they excavated the fish-within-a-fish.  Later, that day, we went to Monument Rocks, Kansas where they excavated it.

Back at the Sternberg Museum, I had to run to avoid being eaten by the huge, life-like dinosaurs, especially the T-Rex in the walk-through diorama whose head turns and roars at you as you pass by.

In this picture, you can see me running from Stan, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.   I think this is a funny  picture.  Stan sure is nomadic.  He always moves from museum to museum.

This is a picture of a giant plastic fish.  This fish appears to be carnivorous.  I would most definitely not like to be in the water with one.  I’m not certain what his name is though.

I highly recommend the Sternberg Museum because it has so many great dinosaur related things.