Exploring further, we realized we had skipped the vinyl building. Another four bounce houses were here, with two dinosaur ride stations, the archeology sand pit, the photo studio green screen and the merchandise tables.

All of this was sour pizza to my kids, because they didn't have $9 VIP wristbands.

Sorry kids, no way never am I going to buy tickets with a $9 VIP premium, entitling me unlimited use of something I've never even seen.

After a few minutes of looking for a ticket booth, I decided to cash in my savings and promise my kids a crisp $5 bill when we left. That way we would both win.

Inside, long lines snaked through the building and surrounded every attraction. A space-planning engineer had apparently designed this room to permit the maximum length of non-intersecting lines. It was super loud.

The dinosaur rides were similar to a mechanical ride which would sit outside of a supermarket, but as large as a donkey and dinosaur shaped. These were pretty cool.

The archaeology dig was much larger than I expected, probably about 20 feet wide by 20 feet long. There were several large ersatz dinosaur skeletons buried beneath sand, which was actively brushed off by 20 kids, watched by an audience of 40 more kids from the queue.

Review
Jurassic Quest, return of the Dinosaur, is not a bad event. They totally delivered on the "50 realistic dinosaurs", and almost all of them were indeed animated. The signage was clear and legible. The scenery was a little sad, as shown in the dinosaur photos. In person the printed banner backgrounds were not quite as bad as they look in the pictures.

The bounce houses were ok, the rides were ok, the dig was ok. It really felt like a handicap to not have bought the VIP tickets, but there was no activity or experience which really made us regret that decision. In some ways the VIP bracelet was like having handcuffs, in that you were locked in to waiting in a bunch of 30 minute wait lines.