Hold on to Your Butts

I once went to this attraction in Pennsylvania called Living Waters. The internet is trying to tell me that I'm making all of this up and that this place never existed as I remember it, but I assure you that this was for real. My mom will corroborate the story.

Living Waters was a freebie experience for those with tickets to a show at the far-more-spectacular Sight and Sound Theater. It was a tiny theater that had equally tiny fountains lit by colored spotlights. These fountains danced to religious music for 30 minutes or so, and that was the show. It was less than impressive.

Much like Living Waters, the Dinosaurs Come Alive(!) show at the Dulles Expo Center underwhelmed but astonished with the sheer ballsiness of the producers' ability to call it an attraction. The last time I went to the expo center, I had a stomach flu that I refused to let stop me, and I threw up in multiple places inside and outside the center. So, we could assume that Dinosaurs Come Alive(!) would be a better expo center experience. Or could we?

Dinosaurs Come Alive(!) was a self-guided tour through displays of animatronic dinosaurs with canned roaring set at a volume just below "jet engine." The displays were educational and moderately informative, even if the production value gave you the giggles like it did for us. Following the animatronics was a display of honest-to-goodness fossils of dinosaurs, birds, and plants. Definitely cool.

But then it got weird. In fact, there was so much WTFery that we decided we should start taking pictures in order for people to believe the experience.

 The website (that I obviously didn't read before yelling, "OMG, dinosaurs!" and dragging Eric all the way to Chantilly) describes the event as "a million dollar dinosaur and fantasy character spectacular." Further, they invite us to suspend logic to "walk though the Enchanted Fairy Garden, guarded by the Magical Talking Tree! Meet our family of Enchanted Fairies including the Fairy of Happy Dreams, the Fairy Godmother, and see the Tooth Fairy Garden. A life-long question will be answered - What happens to all the teeth? Come to the show to find out." Weren't we here for a prehistoric-tastic afternoon with dinosaurs coming alive(!)?

Amidst the roars echoing through the expo center, we were guided into the Enchanted Fairy Garden, which was a Living-Waters-esque spotlit section with mannequins in bargain bin lingerie. If one could take her eyes off of the fairies, there was a dragon looming at about six feet tall. I'm sorry to say that I didn't find out "what happens to all the teeth" as promised by the website. I did, however, progress through the expo to the gift shop.

You'd expect there to be t-shirts with dinosaurs/dragons or fairies, maybe some figurines of those too. Nope, not really. What the gift shop did have was tickets to a "gem mine," turtle picture frames, race car toys, Spongebob t-shirts, Hello Kitty, Mickey Mouse, and cowboy themed candies, some lady sleeping up against an inflatable dragon, educational videos about butterflies, and socks. Not dinosaur socks, not little fairy socks, but plain grey and black ankle socks.

After the gift shop, there was an area that clearly showed the expo producers were like, "This place is bigger than we thought." The space was consequently filled with animal moon bounces and slides, only one of which related to the already-flimsy theme. There was also an area that looked to be getting set up for a mechanical bull, a coloring station where kids could learn how to draw dogs, a free Zumba class, and a cafe where you could buy lattes and beer to go with your disappointment.

This experience cost a total of $40 for the two of us, not including the gas to get there and opportunity cost of being there instead of doing something more productive or logical. It's hard to get the full impact, but Eric's face in this picture illustrates his feelings about the expo. Mine shows that I'm way more fun at dinosaur expos than Eric.