Walking with Dinosaurs - The Live Experience

This Wednesday my UPS rep handed me 5 tickets for the "Walking with Dinosaurs - The Live Experience" Show at Phillips Arena for today! What a great treat. We didn't tell the children exactly what we were going to do this Saturday, just that it was going to be a BIG surprise! Of course they started asking questions immediately and didn't stop for the last 3 days. Some of their guesses got pretty close, but we didn't give anything away.

Sophie stayed at a friends house last night for a Birthday Party sleepover. This morning before we picked her up, we decided to show the boys the website for the show, just to make sure they weren't going to be too scared. Their eyes got all big and they were very excited. They promised not to tell Sophie.

After picking up Sophie, who said she didn't want to be told anyways as she liked the suspense and guessing, we headed on to downtown Atlanta. Luckily the show didn't start on time, as we were about 10 minutes late, guess who's fault that was!

Sophie had it figured out before we walked into the building, with enough posters and announcements outside.

The show was very good and it was amazing what they had come up with. The robots/machines/animatronics (?) were very well done. The smaller ones had humans carry them from the inside. They were dressed in some kind of cloth that mad them almost invisible with the lighting. The bigger dinosaurs moved by themselves, sitting on top of what locked like a long rock cross, laying on the floor, that were motorized and moved them around. You can see it clearly in the photos with the large T-Rex. The dinosaurs really did look like they were walking!

A live narrator, dressed as an explorer, did a great job explaining everything and leading us through the show. You can see him in this photo on the very right. Gives you a good idea on just how big these dinos were, too. The music, dinosaur sounds and lighting complimented the story line. They even had the lighting simulate plant growth, rain, dinosaur tracks, lava and so on. They also had "real-time time-laps" plants growing all around the field and out of the rocks in the middle of the arena. You really had to see it to believe it.

We had great seats up in one of the suites and overlooked the whole arena. Sophie was a little scared. Although we were in the second row of the suite seats with a glass partition separating us from the first row, she was afraid that little Alex, who was going back and forth between us, was going to tumble over it. Only goes to show that she is a great big sister that really loves her little brothers.

The boys of course wanted to get some dinosaur toys on the way out, but I was not about to spend twice the money for toys we can pick up at any regular store. So on the way home we stopped by Krispy Kream for some fresh doughnuts to take home, at ToysRUs to pick up a big box of dinosaur plastic toys, Arby's for a late lunch and finally the library to get some books, including dinosaur books of course.

The boys love their new dinosaur toys and are already playing with them in the sunroom. They are using their Fisher Price castle to stage a great dinosaur show!

The "Walking with Dinosaurs" show was great, but even better since we got the tickets for free. Thanks UPS!

Here are also some great videos shot by the show team themselves.