Family Fun Time at the Dino Safari

Do you have any little (or big) dinosaur lovers in the family? Now you can take part in one at Dino Safari, currently in a few cities around the USA. Who doesn’t want to go on an expedition to observe dinosaurs in their “natural” habitat?

My kids recently binge-watched Camp Crustaceus on Netflix and loved the show. So when I first saw there was a dinosaur event coming to the area, I knew we wanted to check it out.

After poking around the website, I discovered this is a self-paced drive-thru experience with over 40 animotronics that you see and learn about many different dinosaurs. This seemed right up our ally…

• Covid safe ✔
• Topic of interest ✔
• Short and easy ✔
• Educational ✔

After a little research, I choose a date and time that was best for us and bought my tickets. Now I just had to wait to surprise the kid about the fun family adventure.

Before the Event

I was able to easily purchase tickets for the carload at the website. You can add some merchandise or mystery bag for extra, but we choose not to.

If you are anything like me, you will wait until the last second to review the material and realize you should have downloaded an app in order to watch the pre-video! LOL. So fair warning, this is some information you may want to review before heading to the Safari.

The app mostly just sets the tone of what you are going to see with a few things to know. We finally revealed our outing to the kids as we listened to the app on our drive over. This was good because the info was fresh in our mind good and it got the little ones excited enough.

The Dino Experience

We visited the Dino Safari in the giant parking lot at the Shoppes at Parma in Ohio.

Once we arrived, it took us a moment to realize the event was around the back but the closer we got to it, the more signage we saw. It was a really fast and easy check in process with just a scan of the tickets on my phone.

We turned on the audio tour available on the app and entered the Dino Safari. The audio tour was nice for learning information, but it was difficult to maintain along with driving the area and trying to read the signage. We never knew if we were at the right part in the audio.

If you are a visual learner and need to read it yourself, it is very difficult to have the audio too. But for those that don’t want to read or that have kids too small, it would be nice to have something to go along with the drive.

The experience split the dinosaurs up by regions and time periods which I really enjoyed learning about. And with over forty different dinosaurs part of the exhibit, we were able to learn about new dinosaurs and enjoy the traditional our ones we already were familiar with.

To help keep their interest, my kids took turns reading the material at each section and dinosaur. The most interesting information to them was if they were omnivore, carnivore or herbivore.

A little ways through there was a stop where a cast member showed us some real fossils and answered some questions from the kiddos. My favorite part was when he showed us the dino poop and my son responded “Oh, so that is why it smells so bad”, we all just started laughing. The “archeologist” stayed in character though and maintained the story.

About 45 or so minutes and the adventure was over. It was a success!

DETAILS:

Running through August 5 at The Shoppes in Parma and various other locations.

HOURS: Wednesdays to Sundays from 10 am – 9pm.

TICKETS:

PRICING RECENTLY UPDATED
Summer Flex Pricing
$10 per person up to 4 occupants*
$49.95 for a 5-7 person family pack*
$59.95 for an 8+ person family pack*

*includes entrance for one vehicle to drive thru the safari, dinosaur passport, and an audio “tour”.

I have also seen random ticket deals available on Groupon so you may want to check that out to save a few bucks. (If you are a Southwest credit card holder, there is usually bonus points given when shopping Groupon through Southwest Shopping 😉. Click here to sign up for your credit card to start earning).

Final Thoughts

All in all, this was a nice way to spend about an hour on a Sunday. The process ran very smoothly from the minute I purchased the tickets until we left the event, which is always a bonus.

Most importantly, we all enjoyed the experience and were impressed by the size of the animatronic dinosaurs. The kids ran out of a little steam close to the end but were re-energized when we came across T-Rex at the end. It was a fantastic way to end our experience.