Jurassic Holidays

By Richard Noble

A holiday of a lifetime back to the time of the dinosaurs goes horribly wrong when a deadly virus is brought back in time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781291970326

Book preview

Jurassic Holidays

Jurassic Holidays

By

Richard Noble

Copyright

© Richard Noble 2014

All rights reserved

First Edition

ISBN – 978-1-291-97032-6

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Also by Richard Noble:

Lightning Strikes

Lyme Travel

Chapter One

The year was 3012. The world had moved past the new millennium celebrations and other matters were now at the front of people’s minds. For the Hamble family it was their holiday at Lyme Regis. To be precise their Jurassic journey that was taking up all their conversations at supper time. The Hambles lived at the town of Wokingham in Berkshire. Jackie and George Hamble were teachers at the educational establishment on the outskirts of town which catered for the young from the age of ten to eighteen. Jackie taught natural science and George practical science.

They had two children, Simon ages 14 and Wendy aged 17.

The idea for the holiday came from a history project that Wendy had been assigned the previous year. The title of the project was Then and Now and made the students choose their own topic. It was Jackie who remembered the ancient album in the family history chest which had been handed down to the eldest in each family over the years. Many times they had thought about handing it into the central museum archive but they didn’t manage to get round to it. Maybe after the project?

Wendy had been enthusiastic from the moment her mother has suggested the idea it was then that George brought out the old album known as The Cards of Lyme Regis. It was a folder holding small picture cards. Wendy had heard of such items in her history of the twentieth century under the communications section. She explained them to her brother.

There was a time before digiscreens when words and images were recorded on a flat texture called paper card. And when people went on holiday they would send these cards to their family to show them an image of where they were on holiday. On the reverse they put a postal address and some text describing the holiday location and the weather conditions.

Do you mean the physical card was sent to the family? How was this done?

There was a central clearing centre called a Post Office. I handled millions of such cards

Sounds like a waste of paper cards. Why did they not use electronic delivery?

"It was not invented and used by most people until into 2000. Most of the cards come from the 1900’s. With the cards album was also a paper book from the period. The pages were yellow and very brittle and far too fragile to use. Wendy would use the title to search in the British Library online reference section. There would probably be a scanned online version she could use. The original book would go to the local museum at their next visit. And so Wendy started on her project. She divided it into two halves, Lyme Regis in 2000 and Lyme Regis in 3000.

In 2000 Lyme Regis was a town on the coast where people visited fro rest and entertainment. The resident population were there either to provide services for the visitors or were people beyond the working age, the so called retired. There were also young growing up attending educational establishments. The town could be divided into four sections. A walled harbour for vessels that navigated the seas, a frontage to the sea for entertainment, shops which provided goods and services and a residential area of accommodation units (called houses). The geology of the area was a seam of rock from 67million years in the past. The era known as the Jurassic. The cliffs were of a soft grey material and were continually eroded by the action of the sea especially in winter months.

Out of these cliffs would be found fossil remains of the animals of the Jurassic period. The town used this geological bounty to attract visitors to both see the museums and purchase souvenir fossils. The other entertainment provided by the town included relaxing on the sea front, gardens of plants for visual enjoyment, food emporiums and an indoor arena for communal visual story telling called a cinema and live entertainment activities at a theatre. There were several festivals held during the year in all the different seasons. In the documentation of the time it was considered an excellent traditional holiday resort. There were churches, schools and sports facilities for the local people. The town had a busy and lively holiday season from May to September but was much quieter for the remaining seven months of the year.

This however was not the town’s biggest problem. The erosion of the sea cliffs was a continual threat to the very existence of the town. The town had built great stone defenses to protect the inhabited areas. However the cliffs either side were not defended and the sea was a constant threat. And so it was that the sea eroded the cliffs year after year. By 3000 Lyme Regis was a very different location. It was now one mile inland from the 2000 frontage, so great had been the effect of the waves from the sea and rain from the hills. It was no longer a resort for people to spend time relaxing along the sea front. This had all changed in the year 2010 with the discovery of the Lyme Regis time portal (see Lightning Strikes) by the Grant Family and by 3000 it had been renamed as Jurassic LR City and had become a world heritage site. One of only three time portal sites the other two being in china and USA.

It has been realized that many locations could be made into holiday resorts all around the coast of Scirwand (Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England) but only one Jurassic portal existed. So it was that the Jurassic Corporation was founded in 2600to include the Jurassic University and Jurassic Holidays Enterprises. When a Jurrasic fossil was placed in the time portal and the huge power of the Isotron Beam activated the occupants were transported back 67 Million years to the Jurassic period. And so the area had changed from being a place to find dinosaur fossils along the beach to a place to see dinosaurs alive in their own time.

Jackie had attended the university as part of her Natural Science Course and had spent three months studying paleontology. As a student she did not qualify to go through the time portal but studied the digital images brought back from the period. The time portal was an advanced viewing platform of life 67 million years earlier. The travelers would remain in a current time enclosed area but be able to see the ancient life forms through great domes. The two time zones did not physically connect; it was a