You may have seen a moving – and loud – dinosaur in the back of a pick-up truck over the last day and thought: “What’s all that about?”
But Mark de Bruijn’s daughter seems likely to have a different reaction.
De Bruijn, the proprietor of Townline Road rock and gem store MarkRockOn Lapidary Supplies, bought the dinosaur on Thursday for his shop, which includes a variety of mineral-related kids’ activities. He has been driving around with the dinosaur – cost: a reasonable-ish sounding $8,000 – ever since.
It’s delighted kids at local schools and likely puzzled motorists around town.
“It makes everybody smile, so it makes me smile,” he said. “The kids love it, so it’s something they can come and visit at our warehouse. So I’m going to drive around town, and maybe some of the Lower Mainland towns to let people know we’re here.”
At schools, it’s drawn kids to fences, some more certain than others that the dinosaur isn’t actually real.
“Everywhere I drive people are smiling and honking. It just puts a little bit of pleasure in peoples’ day. We all have a little stress and that laugh and smile you get out of people makes them happy and it makes me happy.”
On Friday, the dinosaur was set to hit the road as de Bruijn headed west into Vancouver on a different specific mission: to pick his daughter up from the University of British Columbia.
“She doesn’t know I have the dinosaur in the back of the truck.”
Video by: Ben Lypka/Abbotsford News
