Man follows footsteps of dinosaurs on solo cross-country expedition
Roger Delgado of Renfrew spent 20 days this summer following in the footsteps of dinosaurs. It was a trek that took him from Kentucky to Texas to California to South Dakota.
Along the way he took a few side trips to see Corvettes, World War I era airplanes and the flying pancake.
Before his odyssey was done, Delgado put 6,850 miles on his 2005 Nissan Ultima along with two oil changes and a tire rotation.
Delgado said he's taken cross-country road trips before but generally with companions. This was a solo jaunt.
Delgado left Aug. 1.
“It's a nice change of pace,” he said. “You leave your driveway and go onto to something else, which is a nice feeling.”
Delgado said his trip had four objectives: Visit museums with dinosaur skeletons,visit air museums, hone his photography skills, and drop in on relatives on the West Coast.
Delgado said he's had a fascination with dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals since he's been a child.
“I've had an interest in prehistoric animals as far back as I can remember,” he said. “I remember being a little kid and being interested in sauropods, like the brontosaurus types. I've always liked those.”
Driving south through Kentucky and Tennessee, Delgado said he made his first unplanned detour.
“I came across a sign for the Corvette Museum in Kentucky. I didn't know it existed. I just ran across it,” said Delgado.
“I came across a sign and I said, 'Look at that.' I figured I'd better stop. I don't know when I will be this way again,” he said.
The Corvette Museum opened in 1994 in Bowling Green, which is also the home of the world's sole General Motors Corvette assembly plant.The museum made international headlines on Feb 12, 2014, when a sinkhole collapsed in the Skydome of the museum in the early morning hours, tumbling eight Corvettes into its depths. Five of the cars were damaged beyond repair.After that side trip, Delgado continued south into Texas and a stop at the Naranjo Museum of Natural History in Lufkin. The museum has bones of a tyrannosaurus rex and a triceratops.He then headed to Houston.“Houston has a very, very good collection at the Houston Museum of Natural Science,” he said.After Houston, he drove west to Austin and then on to Dallas where he stopped at the Frontiers of Flight Museum with its collection of aircraft, including the 1940s vintage V-173 “Flying Pancake” and the Cavanaugh Flight Museum's World War I aircraft.
From Dallas, Delgado drove west.“Headed west, it felt like I was driving forever. And I was still in Texas,” he said.Eventually he arrived in Los Angeles where he visited the Museum of Natural History and the George C. Page Museum at the LaBrea Tar Pits. The Page museum exhibits paleontological discoveries from the site on which it sits. Asphalt deposits underlie the whole area and contain the fossils of thousands of Ice Age animals that got trapped in the sticky pools.Delgado said the remains of mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, bison and giant condors, all animals that died in the tar pits, are on exhibit.He then traveled north to his hometown of San Francisco where he stayed with relatives a few days before driving east to Salt Lake City and its impressive collection of prehistoric mammals at the Natural History of Utah Museum.Delgado drove to the Fossil Butte Monument Museum in Wyoming.“It has a beautiful presentation. It's absolutely worth going out of your way to see it. It's out in the middle of nowhere,” he said of the museum and its collection of fossilized fish, insects, plants, reptiles, birds and mammals.He reached Yellowstone National Park in a light rain and had an encounter with an animal that wasn't in a museum display.There was a traffic stoppage in the park, Delgado said, “There was a bison walking down the middle of the road.”He said he pulled off to the right of the roadway to give the bison plenty of room.Wending his way through the American West, Delgado stopped at the Crazy Horse Memorial and Mount Rushmore in the Black
Hills of South Dakota.“I always have to go to Mount Rushmore to pay homage,” said Delgado.He made a stop at the famous Wall Drug before turning south on U.S. Route 183 and headed into Nebraska.It was in Nebraska that he made a delicious discovery.It was in Chances Are, a restaurant in Grand Island, that he sampled a French-dip sandwich that he still remembers fondly.Arriving in Lincoln, Delgado made a visit to the University of Nebraska's State Museum in Morrill Hall with its collection of ancient elephants, fossil rhinos, giant camels and horses that once lived in the state.It's famous elephant hall holds a collection of various bygone pachyderms, including the Columbian mammoth, an elephant that dwarfed its cousin, the woolly mammoth.The Columbian mammoth was nearly as tall as a two-story building and was estimated to weigh as much as a combined five cars.“Elephants used to be extremely diverse,” Delgado said.With that final stop, Delgado turned east and headed for home.His three-week trip hasn't cured Delgado's urge to get out on the road again.He said, “I'm going to keep doing it until I do it right. When I get the chance, I will go again. I've gone solo, but it's better to go with someone.”
