Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana

Today we visited the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT.  It is most famous for its dinosaur exhibit, and Josh and Janine hoped that N. would find it interesting.

They also have a planetarium.  Since that was near the entrance, and a show was about to start, we went in there first.  The show was about black holes.  The production was very flashy, but at the end I came out very confused, and Geoff stated that he was concerned that it was bad science, and that it would confuse young people and old people too.

Then we went to the dinosaur exhibit.  It traced the geology of the area from the beginning of time to the time of the dinosaurs.  Montana had many of the traditional dinosaurs, including the T-Rex and the Triceratops.  They had an almost complete skeleton of a mother Triceratops and her baby.  (The picture is taken from the museum website). 

 

The most exciting part was the T-Rex.  (This picture is also taken from the museum website).

 After the dinosaurs, there was a short exhibit on regional history that contained artifacts from life in the olden days.  N. was getting bored, so her mother took her outside.  Geoff and I continued on to the traveling exhibit, which was about chocolate.  It was very interesting.  I learned that cocoa was drunken by the Meso-Americans as a bitter drink, kind of like coffee.  Also, soldiers in the world wars were given bars of chocolate to carry, and to only be eaten if necessary, but it tasted like potatoes, so there was little temptation for them to eat it.

We met up with the others in the lobby, and decided to watch one more planetarium show, called "Back to the Moon for Good."  It was essentially a propaganda piece about the Google Lunar X Prize Competition.  There is an award of $30 million to the first privately funded team that sends a robot to the moon and travels 1650 feet, and sends back evidence of this accomplishment.  Although there are teams all over the world working on this, no one has actually accomplished this, although the end showed one team winning.  I had never heard of this, although both Geoff and Josh had, and a quick google search found that no one has won the prize, and the deadline is December 31st of this year. 

The Living History Farm was located outside.  At the Living History Farm, there was a working farmhouse, with costumed interpreters working in the kitchen.  Upstairs, another interpreter was spinning wool.  In the dining room, an interpreter was making dolls, and she made one for N., who named her doll Anna.  There was also a large garden outside of the house, and a blacksmith shop.  

 

By now, it was getting kind of late, so we decided to head on to Ennis, MT.  It was about an hour drive.  We checked into our cabins- we were staying at a place called El Western.  We had a cabin, and our friends had a cabin next to ours, and they were very reasonably priced and clean.

 The inside of the cabin was very cabin-like!

We went back to Nacho Mama's for supper, and went walking down by the river after that.  It was getting late, even though there was still light in the sky.  Josh had brought some games, and he came over to our cabin while Janine put N. to bed.  We played a game called Red November.  It is a cooperative game where there are a bunch of gnomes in a submarine and they have to save the submarine before time runs out.  It was interesting.  Eventually Janine wandered over with a book in hand.  When we finished the game we stayed up talking for a while, then made plans for the next day and went to bed.