Photo Post 14: The Rex in Jacksonville FL

In August of last year, we spent a day in Chattanooga and made a stop by Sir Goony’s for me to run around with the camera shooting the various mini-golf obstacles. One of these obstacles was a big orange tyrannosaur. The Goony Golf chain was a 1960s-era ripoff of Florida’s Goofy Golf. Roadside Architecture has documented all these surviving places fairly well – about a million times better than we can ever do – and while I was looking around her site for ideas for toddler-friendly things to do and see in Jacksonville, I was pleased to see that a lone Goony tyrannosaur was still standing guard at a shopping center. (You want dinosaurs in Florida? She’s got two pages of them!)

As you see from the plaque, some civic and business leaders took a lot of pride in their dinosaur, and, if you look at some of the sites linked to by R.A. from her post, it was in pretty sorry shape before it was restored.

For our part, we hyped up the visit to the dinosaur for about a week, and the baby was awestruck and impressed. He’s two and a half, a perfect age to find great big statues of monsters exciting and ever so slightly worrying. Incidentally, it was a happy accident that damaged the little fence around the tyrannosaur, because you can tell your kid that while the dinosaur is asleep right now, he must have gotten angry recently and burst out from his cage. “Wowwwwwwww,” the toddler said.

If you’re only reading these chapters, then you are missing part of the story! We have a fantastic Facebook page, where you’ll be able to follow along with much more than just links to chapters here, but additional information about our favorite places, including PR announcements, links when our friends-in-blogging visit them, and other follow-up news about the places we’ve been when we can find it. Give us a like and tell your friends to come see us!