Growing up on the family farm was a lot of fun in many ways, but sometimes as a kid I envied my siblings, nephews and nieces who got to take car trips and go places for more than a couple of days at a time. It was hard for my Dad to get away from the cows, who had had to be milked every twelve hours or so. (He could get a neighbor to take care of them for a day or two but that was about it.)
So I treasured car trips away from the farm. We nearly always headed east to visit relatives in either Burley/Rupert or Pocatello, so we drove through a little town called Bliss quite often. Although it was pretty small, it became one of the places I remembered most fondly. I particularly remembered a little roadside attraction called Dinyland, which had big concrete dinosaurs that you could climb around on. This photo shows me and two of my nephews, Andy and Dan Tiller, sitting on one of them in 1961.
I also remember that Dinyland had a little tourist shop where you could convince your parents to buy a trinket or two. I think I got either an Indian tom-tom or bow and arrow on that trip.
My wife and kids love to stop in places like that, too. On a trip to L.A. a couple of years ago, Sandy insisted that we stop and see “The Thing” on I-10. It was bigger than Dinyland, which didn’t survive after the freeway passed Bliss by, but just as cheesy.
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