A couple of weekends back, I gassed up the car and loaded it with day-trip staples (maps, water, Goldfish crackers, trail mix, Cheez-its, fruit, kids, etc.) and set off on a long — and long overdue — trip to John Day Fossil Beds National Monument northeast of Prineville.

We’ve lived in Bend since 2001, yet John Day Fossil Beds’ three units — The Painted Hills, Sheep Rock and Clarno — remained names we’d seen in passing but never places we’d been in person.

However, in late March, during a solo drive to northeast Oregon, I took the scenic route and followed signs, and impulse, to Sheep Rock Unit, the largest of the Fossil Beds’ three units, and drove the couple of miles north on Route 19 to the Thomas Condon Paleontology Visitor Center.

That was Easter Sunday, and the place was largely deserted. After maybe two minutes spent walking around the center’s well done exhibits, I knew I had to return with my kids.

My companions for the return trip were my twin daughters, Lucy and Lilly, age 10. That’s an age where they still find fossils fascinating, but it’s also an age at which, unprovoked, they’ll utter keen observations, such as, “That was almost as depressing as Chemult,” after we drove through the tiny burg of Mitchell. (Sorry, Mitchellians and Chemultites.)

We tried to get an early start, but I was happy to get out the door before 9 a.m., taking U.S. Highway 20 to Powell Butte Highway and state Highway 126 into Prineville. There, we stopped at Starbucks for coffee and hot chocolates, and continued east on Highway 20, not reaching the Ochoco Reservoir before there was a backseat hot chocolate spill.

Traffic was light and the Ochoco Mountain scenery along 26 is splendid, if winding in places, going from ranches to pine forests to, as we approached the Painted Hills Unit, scruffier, but no less scenic, Eastern Oregon desert.

After little more than an hour, we reached the Painted Hills Unit. Partly because my colleague, Elise Gross, recently wrote about the eroded ash hills in these pages, and partly because we planned to cover a lot of ground in one day. We made this our quickest stop.

We hiked a short ways out on the Painted Hills Overlook Trail, then I ran back to the car for the girls’ windbreakers. They snapped photos and marveled at these colorful mounds, and we made fun of a sign prohibiting us from walking on exposed ground.

Then it was back in the car and about another hour’s drive to the Sheep Rock Unit.

On Route 19, we headed north into Sheep Rock Unit, and headed to the visitor center. We watched a short video elaborating on the history of the beds, from early visitor Thomas Condon, who found evidence of the area’s even earlier residents. According to the monument’s website, www.nps.gov/joda, John Day, the man for whom the river was named, and thus the fossil beds, appears to have never come to the area or found a fossil.

The three units that make up the national monument, established in 1975, cover more than 14,000 acres, and fossils dating back from 5 million to 44 million years have been found in different beds rich with fossils from different periods.

Within the John Day Basin, there are more than 750 fossil sites, and according to the website, scientists have found more than 2,200 species of plants and animals in them. All of the fossils at the visitor center were found in John Day Fossil Beds, and there’s a cool laboratory separating the dusty masses from the staff paleontologists doing their work.

They’re still turning up new species here, according to the film we watched, and paleontologist Ralph W. Chaney (1890-1971) believed there is no other spot in North America as rich in tertiary land animals and plants.

Amazing, I know, right? Speaking of fossils, I don’t own a smartphone. There’s no cell reception in the national monument anyway, so I didn’t look up “tertiary” until a few minutes ago. Tertiary is the period dating from about 64 million to 2 million years ago. It includes the Cenozoic era, which is when modern mammals and plants began appearing.

Central Oregonians, like virtually everyone everywhere, are fond of saying things like, “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.” But if you really want to see some changes, wait several million years.

The diverse array of animals and plants found here are testament to the climate, and geologic changes the area went through over the millennia, from the tropical plants found in the Clarno Nut Beds of about 45 million years ago to the camels and saber-toothed tigers of later eras and drier climates.

Speaking of time, it was time to keep moving. It would have been fun to stop and gaze at the river that paralleled the road most of the drive, but we had lunch plans 54 miles away in Fossil. It was about 2:30 by the time we reached town. We headed to R.J.’s, where we refueled on burgers and fries.

After we gorged ourselves, I tacked a new destination to our itinerary, the public digging beds behind Wheeler High School. There’s a sign for the fossil beds at the bottom of the hill, and heading up the driveway to the school, follow the one-way sign around back.

The beds are home to plants from the Oligocene period of about 33 million years ago, when the climate was temperate but wetter than now. At the parking area, we paid the token fee — $5 for adults, $3 for each child or $15 for families of four. We grabbed a bucket, a few spades and other tools provided, and headed up the hill behind the football field where we dug around for about 45 minutes.

According to Oregon Paleo Lands Institute, the fossils found here are from ancestors of modern sycamore, maples, oaks, rose and alder. Apparently, needles from the metasequoia are most abundant here, which must be why we managed to find a few.

From there, we went on to Clarno Unit, just 18 miles west on Route 218. It was late in the day when we arrived, but we saw The Palisades, which the monument’s website describes as a sand, silt and clay cliff with “the jumbled remains of a forest” inside of it. Formed by major ancient mudflows, it was perhaps the most stunning thing we saw that day, and we’d seen a lot.

We took the Geologic Time Trail to the Clarno Arch Trail and up, where at the top of the trail we looked up and saw the small arch and two fossilized tree trunks about 40 feet up the wall — a vertical one that withstood a mudflow, and another that had wedged up against it — resembling a capital T.

Alas, there were many things we didn’t get to see that day, including the Cant Ranch Historic Area and numerous trails. We left Clarno Unit about 5:30 p.m., finally returning home after 7:30. The girls were tired, hungry and full of fossil lore to share with Mom and their older sister.

It should be noted that you won’t find dinosaur fossils around here because this area was under the Pacific Ocean when reptiles ruled the Earth. But you can always watch “Jurassic Park 3D” if that’s what you’re looking for.

If you go

Getting there: To make the loop from Prineville, take U.S. Highway 26 east approximately 50 miles and follow signs to The Painted Hills Unit. From there, head back east on U.S. Highway 26, turn left at Route 19 (John Day Highway) and continue to the Thomas Condon Paleontology Visitor Center. Continue north on Route 19 to Fossil. Public digging beds are behind Wheeler High School. From Fossil, take road 218 to Clarno Unit. Continue heading west on 218 to U.S. Highway 97 South.

Difficulty: Easy

Cost: Free, but donations are accepted

Contact: www.nps.gov/joda