Wed, August 1st

Well after spending the night in Provo we were headed to Delta Utah for our Trilobite dig. We stopped first at Wal-mart, there was not a single family there with less than 4 kids. I noticed it and Rick mentioned it also. Only other thing we noticed was that produce was very cheap – a huge avocado for 78 cents, everything else was about half what it costs in KC.

We started heading west for Delta, Utah a small, small town. From there you drive another 20 miles of which is gravel, first tightly packed but the last 8 were rough. And there was nothing out there – not another car, building or anything, it was straight out of a horror movie, tumbleweeds and all. We weren’t sure we were going the right way but every once in a while there’d be a sign for the U Dig Fossil quarry. Finally make it there and there is a shack and a truck but no person (Rick almost drove the RV over a gravel cliff). We looked around finally I saw a cowbell to ring and right then he came up over the hills on an ATV. Gene must have been about 75, looked about 90 and talked so slow I couldn’t stand it! Very nice (his daughter lives in Lenexa) but we were a little hyped up after our scary drive out there and we still had a 5 hour drive to our next location – Grand Canyon.

This is the gravel road but aside from the gravel this is what it looks like all the way through Utah

So he finally took us out to the quarry and showed us how to split the shale, pretty cool, but giving a rock hammer to my four kids was a little frightening. The girls had refused to wear real shoes so they all had on flip flops – yes flip flops in a slippery rock quarry. I told them I wasn’t going to help them if they fell. Anyway Lauren insisted on also having a hammer and did her usual routine of singing to the rocks and dancing, Cate would find a trilobite and then spend 5 minutes explaining to us where she found it, and Blair kept saying ‘Found one!’ when a lot of times there were chips of ones. Grant in typical boy style climbed the hill and just swung his hammer trying to break whatever rocks he could, then he found the giant crow bar used to lift large rock sections. We were all fine as long as we gave him enough swinging room. It didn’t seem like we found that many but when we were done we had a good pile but you had to work for them, we were under the misconception that you just had to split some shale and there would be a trilobite – in reality it was about 1 out of 20.

Now driving the long drive to Arizona, Grant and Blair spent hours today doing Sudoku puzzles after I told them I pay 25 cents for each finished one. Kept them quiet for the longest time of the entire trip!